Relativism

First published Sun Feb 2, 2003

Relativism is not a single doctrine but a family of views whose common
theme is that some central aspect of experience, thought, evaluation,
or even reality is somehow relative to something else. For example
standards of justification, moral principles or truth are sometimes
said to be relative to language, culture, or biological makeup.
Although relativistic lines of thought often lead to very implausible
conclusions, there is something seductive about them, and they have
captivated a wide range of thinkers from a wide range of traditions.

Relativistic motifs turn up in virtually every area of philosophy.
Many versions of descriptive relativism (described
below)
bear on issues in the
philosophy of social science concerning the understanding and
interpretation of alien cultures or distant historical epochs. Other
versions bear on issues in the philosophy of mind about mental content.
Still others bear on issues in the philosophy of science about
conceptual change and incommensurability.

Relativistic themes have also spilled over into areas outside of
philosophy; for example, they play a large role in today's "culture
wars." Some strains of ethical relativism (also described
below)
even pose threats to our standards and practices
of evaluation and, through this, to many of our social and legal
institutions. And the suggestion that truth or justification are
somehow relative would, if correct, have a dramatic impact on the most
fundamental issues about objectivity, knowledge, and intellectual
progress.

Relativistic arguments often begin with plausible, even truistic
premises--e.g., that we are culturally and historically situated
creatures, that justification cannot go on forever, that we cannot talk
without using language or think without using concepts--only to end up
with implausible, even inconsistent, conclusions. There is little
consensus, however, about how to block the slide from inviting points
of departure to uninviting destinations.

Both sides in debates over relativism tend to oversimplify the views
of the other side. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that
relativistic theses often come in two forms: a bold and arresting
version, which is proclaimed, and a weaker, less vulnerable version,
which is defended--with the first having a tendency to morph into the
second when under attack. Relativism also often sounds better in the
abstract than it does when we get down to actual cases, which often
turn out to be rather trivial, on the one hand, or quite implausible,
on the other. But it is also true that most academic philosophers in
the English-speaking world see the label ‘relativist’ as
the kiss of death, so few have been willing to defend any version of
the doctrine (there is less reluctance in some other disciplines).
Indeed, many explicit characterizations of relativism are to be found
in the writings of unsympathetic opponents, who sketch flimsy versions
to provide easy targets for criticism.

Discussions of relativism are also frequently marred by all-or-none
thinking. Phrases like “everything is relative” and
“anything goes” suggest versions of relativism that, as we
will see, often are inconsistent. But to conclude that there are no
interesting versions of relativism is to err in the opposite direction.
Often the important question is whether there is a space for an
interesting and plausible version of relativism between strong but
implausible versions (e.g., all truth is relative), on the one hand,
and plausible but trivial versions (e.g., some standards of etiquette
are relative), on the other.

Finally, relativistic themes are frequently defended under
alternative banners like ‘pluralism’ or
‘constructivism’ (with a particular author's line between
relativism and pluralism typically marking off those views he likes
from those he doesn't). I will use the label ‘relativist’
for all such views, with the understanding that many species of
relativism may be plausible or even true. But it is the views, not the
labels, that are important.

Section one contains a sketch of the general form of many
relativistic claims and maps the general terrain. Section two explores
the main things that have been thought to be relative and section three
the main things they have been relativized to. Section four presents
the chief motivations and arguments for relativism, and section five is
devoted to the major responses to the major relativistic themes. After
section one the sections, and in many cases subsections, are relatively
modular, and readers can use the
detailed tables of contents,
an
index,
and hyperlinks
in the text to locate the topics of most interest to them.

In this section we consider the general form of the major
relativistic claims and introduce some distinctions to map the terrain.
We then note the major candidates for things that have been claimed to
be relative and the things to which they are often relativized. We also
distinguish descriptive and normative versions of relativism and see
that normative relativism has two faces, an anti-realist face (there
are no framework-independent facts of certain sorts)
and a realist face (but there are framework-dependent facts of
those sorts). It will save qualifications if we view the relativist as
an ideal type that a number of thinkers approach rather closely, even
when they disavow that label ‘relativist’.

One is not a relativist, or a descriptive or normative relativist,
simpliciter. Both descriptive and normative relativism are
families of views, each member of which holds that one or more things
(e.g., epistemic standards, moral principles) is relative to something
else (e.g., language, culture), and it is possible to be a relativist
about some of these things but not about others.

It
is often useful to think about
relativism in terms of a general relativistic schema:

Relativistic Schema:Y is relative to
X.

Different versions of relativism result from replacing Y by
different features of thought, experience, evaluation, or even reality
(e.g., modes of perception, standards of rationality), replacing
X by something that is thought to lead to differences in the
value of Y (e.g., language, historical period), and explaining
what the phrase relative to amounts to in the case at hand.
Each choice of Y and X yields both a version of
descriptive relativism and a version of normative relativism (we turn
to these
below).
Many variations are possible, but
for a relativistic thesis to be of much interest, Y needs to
be something that is important and that is often regarded as
non-relative across groups. [1]

It will be useful to have a generic, catch-all label for the
X slot--what things are relativized to--and following
a common usage we will speak of relativization to conceptual
frameworks or simply frameworks. Cover terms that have
been used in related ways include ‘worldview’
(Weltanschauung), ‘categorial scheme’ and, more
distantly, ‘form of life’, ‘paradigm’, and
‘life world’ (Lebenswelt). Conceptual frameworks
themselves are almost always thought to be determined by something
else. Hence
labels
like
‘framework’ are really just placeholders, with the real
work being done by concrete instantiations of X with notions
like language, culture, historical epoch, or some other parameter.

In the general schema Y is a dependent variable
(depending on frameworks), and X is the independent
variable (that influences one or more dependent variables). When
people speak of relativism of a given sort they sometimes focus on
factors that typically function as dependent variables (as with
conceptual relativism or moral relativism); other times they focus on
factors that typically function as independent variables (cultural
relativism, the linguistic relativity hypothesis). But a complete
version of relativism requires the specification of both (along with an
account of the relationship between them).

It is easy to over-intellectualize the notion of a conceptual
framework. On most accounts frameworks are not tidy and precise
cognitive artifacts like road maps or axiomatic formal systems. They
are often messy, indefinite, and may include vague intuitions or
cognitive habits as well as specific principles and standards. For
example, we form various cognitive habits so that certain things
automatically count, with little need for argument or reflection, as
strong evidence for certain other things. Nor are frameworks cognitive
artifacts that we can abandon or change at will. We inhabit them. They
permeate many aspects of our thought and experience, providing much of
the texture of our lives, and when they do they are central to who we
are, what matters to us most, and what we can see as making sense. We
return to frameworks in
§3.7.

It will be useful to generalize a distinction familiar from
discussions of ethical relativism and to distinguish descriptive
relativism and normative relativism with respect to
anything that is claimed to be relative (e.g., descriptive relativism
about concepts, normative relativism about truth).

Descriptive relativism
is a
family of empirical claims to the effect that certain groups
in fact have different modes of thought, standards of reasoning, or the
like. Such claims are meant to describe (but not evaluate) the
principles and practices of the two groups, and they are compatible
with the claims that both groups are right (in their different ways),
that only one is, that neither is, or even that (in the case at hand)
there is no such thing as getting things right (e.g., there is no
ultimate fact of the matter as to which epistemic principles or ethical
principles are correct). It is possible to be a descriptive relativist
about some things (e.g., ethical principles) but not about others
(e.g., logical principles).

The claim that a person's culture, language, or the like influences
his modes of thought does not mean that they completely determine how
she thinks.
Smoking
is a causal
factor for lung cancer; other things being equal, smokers are more
likely to get cancer, and to do so because they smoke. But
many other things, from genetic make-up to exposure to asbestos, are
causal factors as well. Similarly, a claim that culture or language or
some other independent variable affects a particular facet of
experience or thought allows for other influences as well, and
descriptive versions of relativism come in stronger and weaker forms,
depending on the hypothesized strength of an independent variable's
influence.

The descriptive relativist's claims about epistemic principles,
moral ideals and the like are often countered by arguments that such
things are universal, and much of the recent literature on these
matters is explicitly concerned with the extent of, and evidence for,
cultural or moral or linguistic or human universals (see Brown, 1991
for a good discussion).

The fact that the various species of descriptive relativisms are
empirical claims may tempt us to conclude that they are of little
philosophical interest, but there are several reasons why this isn't
so.

First, some philosophers, including Kant, argue that certain sorts
of cognitive differences between human beings (or even all rational
beings) are impossible, so such differences could never be found to
obtain in fact. This claim is interesting, because it places a
priori limits on what empirical inquiry could discover and on what
versions of descriptive relativism could be true. Second, claims about
actual differences between groups play a central role in several
arguments for various types of normative relativism; for example,
arguments for normative ethical relativism often begin with claims that
different groups in fact have different moral codes or ideals. Finally,
descriptive versions of relativism help us to separate the fixed
aspects of human nature from those that can vary, and so a descriptive
claim that some important aspect of experience or thought does (or does
not) vary across groups of human beings tells us something important
about human nature and the human condition.

Normative relativism
is a family of non-empirical normative or
evaluative claims to the effect that modes of thought,
standards of reasoning, or the like are only right or wrong, correct or
incorrect, veridical or non-veridical, relative to a
framework. The adjective ‘normative’ is meant in a generic
and untendentious sense that can apply to a wide range of views. Like
the notion of a framework, the real work is done by the specific form
that normativity takes with a specific species of relativism. In the
case of beliefs, for example, being normatively correct amounts to
being true. This does not mean, of course, that the normative
relativist's notion of framework-relative correctness or truth is
always clear, and her first challenge is to explain what it amounts to
in any given case (e.g., with respect to concepts, truth, epistemic
norms).

It is possible to think of normative relativism about something,
e.g., normative ethical relativism, as the thesis that claims about
ethics are not true or false simpliciter, but only have truth
values relative to moral codes or the like. But many of the normative
ethical relativist's arguments run from premises about ethics
to the conclusion that claims in ethics have relative truth
values, rather than depending on general claims about the nature of
truth. In such cases it is often more illuminating to consider the type
of relativism (e.g., normative ethical relativism) directly, without a
detour through a discussion of relative truth, and it also can make it
easier to align discussion with much of the literature on various kinds
of relativism. We will take this approach here, but this is not to deny
that in some contexts it may be more illuminating to examine various
kinds of normative relativism as species of truth-value relativism.

It is possible to be a descriptive relativist about something
without being a normative relativist about it. In contexts where a
point applies to all species of normative relativism, or where it is
clear which species are at issue, I will often simply speak of
normative relativism, without modifiers like ‘conceptual’
or ‘epistemic’, and similarly for descriptive
relativism.

Each species of normative relativism is a Janus-faced view. First
there is an anti-realist face. The normative relativist about
morality, for example, agrees with the anti-realist about morality that
there are no absolute, completely objective, framework-independent
facts about moral truth or moral justification. Similar points hold for
normative relativism and anti-realism about other things like epistemic
standards or truth. But, second, each species of normative relativism
also has a realist face. Its message is that once we
relativize things to frameworks, there are facts about
morality, epistemic justification, truth, or the like.

The existence of the two faces means that the normative relativist
must fight on two very different fronts. On the first front, the
normative relativist must defend anti-realist claims to the effect that
there are no framework-independent facts about which
beliefs, standards, or the like are correct. Sometimes the normative
relativist can adapt standard anti-realist arguments to relativistic
ends. But in many cases these arguments will be too strong, since they
aim to show that there are no facts about which things are correct in
any sense, even a framework-relative one.

On the second front the normative relativist must defend
(relativized) realist claims that there are
framework-relative, or framework-dependent, facts
about what is right, justified, or true. This front is more treacherous
than the first. In some cases it is difficult even to explain what
framework-relative correctness amounts to. Then, assuming such an
explanation has been given, the normative relativist must go on to show
that there really are framework-relative facts or norms of the relevant
sort. Sometimes she can reinterpret or reconstrue standard realist
arguments and positions in a way that allows her to adapt or co-opt
them, but this is not always the case.

In defending the (relativized) realist face of some species of
normative relativism--particularly the more global versions like
normative relativism with respect to epistemic standards, truth, or
reality--the relativist can sometimes reconstrue or reinterpret realist
views about these things with a relativistic spin. This
relativistic reconstrual, like Berkeley's account of physical
objects, is intended to save most of the phenomena of commonsense--to
treat as many of the things that we normally think are true or
justified or right as indeed being true or justified or right--while
giving them a new and arresting philosophical interpretation. Thus, the
normative relativist can agree that at least most events have causes,
that
inference to the best explanation
is a legitimate pattern of inference, and that murder
is wrong. But he offers a new and arresting philosophical account about
the ultimate nature of--though not necessarily the criteria
for--truth, justification, or rightness, relativizing these to
frameworks.

No one thinks that believing something true can always make it true,
so the normative relativist also needs to provide accounts of belief
and truth that allow the him to explain the difference between the two,
that enable him to draw a principled distinction between what the users
of a framework believe to be the case and what really
is the case (relative to that framework). There are various
ways to attempt this, e.g., by arguing that there is some sort of
neutral input that constrains our experience and determines, in concert
with our concepts and other aspect of our framework, what is true in
that framework. On such an account our beliefs may often be wrong. For
example, if I have a concept of a dog and a concept of this room it may
be true that there is a dog in the room, even if I don't believe that
there is. It is not easy to work out the details of such an approach,
but the relativist needs something of the sort to maintain a
descriptive-normative gap, so that merely thinking something right
or true doesn't make it right or true, not even relative to her
framework.

Many philosophers will urge that relativistic reconstrual does not
give us everything we want. Still, as we will
see,
this approach yields a more defensible
relativism than many alternatives do, since it requires fewer revisions
in our concepts and beliefs.

The two faces are not always of one mind. At key junctures the
realist face of normative relativism needs something objective of the
sort that the first face is bound to find threatening. For example,
without something objective it is difficult for the normative
relativist to avoid idealism or to explain how intra-framework
objectivity and truth are possible. As we will see, there is a fine
line here. If the objective constraints play too large a role, the
relativist's view may simply wind up as some sort of pluralistic
realism; if they play too small a role, her view may collapse into some
sort of idealism or solipsism.

Relativism presupposes some measure of realism. If there are no such
things as concepts, beliefs, or modes of reasoning, then groups cannot
differ with respect to their concepts, beliefs, or modes of reasoning.
And if speaking different languages or belonging to different cultures
leads to different modes of thought, then there must be objective
causal connections between speaking a particular language or belonging
to a particular culture, on the one hand, and how one thinks, on the
other.

This suggests that any all-embracing relativism will be difficult to
defend, and in
§5.9
we will see additional
reasons for concluding this. But it would be a mistake to conclude,
without further examination, that this precludes any interesting
versions of relativism. The important question is often whether a
version of realism leaves enough space for interesting
versions of relativism.

Relativism can be divided into subtypes in various ways, with
different divisions useful for different purposes. The classification
I'll use is geared to the relativistic schema

Y is relative to X.

and so involves three things:

Y: the thing that is relative

X: what it's relative to

Type of connection between X and Y (reflected in
the phrase is relative to)

A complete characterization of a species of relativism requires
specification of all three things, telling how changes in one or more
independent variables lead to changes in one or more dependent
variables. The general structure is shown in below in Figure 1.

Figure 1: General Structure of the Taxonomy

It is possible to make more distinctions (e.g., by distinguishing
various kinds of epistemic relativism), fewer (e.g., by lumping
language and culture together), or to add additional categories (e.g.,
aesthetic relativism). It is also would be possible to have more than
two modes of connection (e.g., more than one form of normative
relativism). And of course schemes that are not variants of these are
possible. The present account aims to distinguish interestingly
different views, including those that appear most often in the
literature, without endless proliferation (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The Taxonomy

I will focus on the variables in Table One (see also Figure Two).
The items in the left column of the table are the most common
candidates for Y, those in the right the most common
candidates for X, and there are two modes of connection for
each pairing of X and Y, descriptive and normative.
We will consider the major candidates for dependent variables in
Section 2 and those for independent variables in Section 3 (the numbers
in the table indicate the section where the relevant variable is
discussed).

Major Relativistic Variables

Dependent Variables(What is Relative)

2.1 Central Concepts

2.2 Central Beliefs

2.3 Perception

2.4 Epistemic Appraisal

2.5 Ethics

2.6 Semantics

2.7 Practice

2.8 Truth

2.9 Reality

Independent Variables(Relative to What)

3.1 Language

3.2 Culture

3.3 Historical Period

3.4 Innate Cognitive Architecture

3.5 Choice

3.6.1 Scientific Frameworks

3.6.2 Religion

3.6.3 Gender, Race, or Social Status

3.6.4 The Individual

Even with our moderately coarse distinctions the above parameters
yield (nine times nine =) eighty-one species of relativism, and each
comes in a descriptive version and a normative version (= 162). With
finer distinctions, or with combinations (e.g., the claim that
perception is relative to some interaction between culture and
gender), the number climbs well into the thousands. Only someone
inordinately fond of splitting hairs could persevere through even a
tenth of them, but fortunately many are not particularly interesting
or compelling. For example, it is much more plausible to view ethical
ideals as relative to culture or religion than as relative to
paradigms in high-energy particle physics, and some of the other
positions are inconsequential or trivial. We will confine attention to
a manageable number of the more interesting packages.

We will explore the relationships among the varieties of relativism
in later sections, so here I'll simply note that whether one species of
relativism entails, or precludes, another depends on how the details of
the relevant variables are filled in and on the background assumptions
in play. But even without such detail there seem to be affinities
between some positions (e.g., relativism about reality, relativism about
truth) and strong tensions among others (e.g., the claim that
fundamental modes of cognition are due to culture does not fit easily
with the view that they are relative to innate cognitive
architecture, i.e., to biological makeup).

Although we will consider these matters in more detail below, a few
quick examples may help fix ideas. Thus, many American anthropologists
in the first part of the twentieth century held that ethical values
[2.5]
are relative (both in fact and normatively) to
culture
[3.2],
or
[2.5]-to-[3.2],
for short. Linguistic relativists like Whorf held
that concepts, basic beliefs, and some aspects of perception are
relative (in fact) to language, i.e.,
[2.1;
2.2;
2.3]-to-[3.1].
Kuhn's more relativistic passages in the first
edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions suggest
that
perception,
standards of epistemic appraisal,
and
meaning
are relative (both in fact and
normatively) to paradigms or
scientific frameworks,
i.e.,
[2.3;
2.4;
2.6]-to-[3.6.1]
(further
passages suggest that truth and even reality are also relativized to
paradigms). Although relativism is typically thought of as a
social view,
we can also treat the individual as an
independent variable; for example, many passages in Sartre suggest that
moral values are relative (in fact and normatively) to individuals,
i.e.,
[2.5]-to-[3.6.4].

Not just any difference in concepts, beliefs, epistemic standards,
or the like justifies talk of alternative frameworks or worldviews.
Some concepts, beliefs, and standards are much more central
than others, and interesting versions of relativism involve these.

Let us call concepts that are especially important to a group, that
figure prominently in their most fundamental beliefs,
central concepts
for that group. Central concepts often have much in
common with philosophers' lists of categories. The notion of
centrality is vague, but examples should help fix the idea: our central
concepts include causation, physical object,
person, number, and time, but not the
concepts of a pickup truck, a large infinite cardinal
number, or (for most of us) karma, or
witchcraft.

A
central belief
is a belief that is so fundamental for a person or
group that they could not abandon it without abandoning many other
beliefs (and perhaps some epistemic standards) as well. Our central
beliefs include the convictions that at least many events have causes,
that physical objects exist even when no one perceives them, and that
other people have beliefs and desires. But unlike people at certain
other times and places, few of us have central beliefs (or any beliefs
at all) to the effect that kings rule by divine right or that all of a
person's misfortunes result from evil spells or bad karma. Central
concepts
and central beliefs are
intimately related, since concepts are typically central because they
figure in central beliefs, and central beliefs often involve central
concepts.

Centrality is a functional, rather than as intrinsic,
property of concepts, beliefs, values, standards, and the
like. It is a property they have because of the role they play
in peoples' thought and action, and the same concept or belief might be
central for one group, peripheral for a second, and altogether lacking
for a third.

Centrality comes in degrees, and it would be unrewarding to try to
draw a sharp line between central concepts and beliefs, on the one
hand, and all the remaining concepts and beliefs, on the other.
Moreover, we typically gain a better understanding of relativistic
themes if we evaluate each case on its own merits, note the
similarities and differences between cases, see how these matter, and
worry less about giving a sharp ‘yes’ or ‘no’
to the question of whether a particular concept or belief is
fundamental enough to justify talk about alternative frameworks.

A version of relativism is local if it only applies to limited
aspects of a group's cognitive or evaluative life. For example, some
ethical relativists claim that moral principles or values are relative
to a group but allow that other things, e.g., logic or truth about
non-normative matters, are not relative. Again, claims that scientific
frameworks or paradigms are relative leave room for a non-relative
conception of many other things, e.g., logic or morality. By contrast,
relativism about all epistemic standards or about truth in general
affect more aspects of a persons life and thought, and so are more
global. Locality, like centrality, is a matter of degree.

A
completely
global version of normative
relativism (e.g., normative relativism about truth or about epistemic
justification) claims complete, across-the-board coverage, and this
would make the relativist's own claims and arguments relative too. This
can lead to severe difficulties, including self-refutation, and a
recurring danger for relativists is to assume, often tacitly, that the
concepts, principles, or standards used to formulate their own
relativist theses somehow escape the relativity they insist permeates
everything else.

This difficulty, which we might call the exemptions
problem, turns up in many guises. Here are a few:

It can be tempting for a global normative relativist to hold that
the claim that truth is relative is itself somehow true absolutely or
that the claim that justification is relative is justified in some
absolute sense.

Many relativistic arguments employ the premise that it is
impossible to think or speak about reality “as it really
is”--as it is independently of our modes of thought--because
thinking and speaking requires us to use our concepts and words. But in
order to explain things like intra-framework objectivity, it can be
very tempting to go on to offer minimal descriptions of an extra-mental
reality, e.g., as containing objective similarities that guide our
classifications or as playing a causal role in our perception.

Claims that values or truth or rationality are relative to culture,
language or the like often assume that there are various absolute
truths about culture, language, or the like.

The claim that ethical (and perhaps other) values are relative to
cultures or moral codes plays a key role in some defenses of tolerance;
all views are equally good, so we should respect them all. But
tolerance and open-mindedness are values, and they can hardly be
defended by arguing that there are no objective values.

Relativism is not always the most effective topic for promoting
consistency in those who discuss it, and as we will see
below
many relativistic views are unable to give a
consistent account of the status of their own claims. With
care some local versions of relativism can avoid the exemptions
problem, but it is an ever-present danger for more global versions.

In this section we examine the chief candidates for relativistic
dependent variables. As we will see
below,
they are
not all independent of one another, but they are often singled out for
separate treatment, and we begin by following suit.

Conceptual relativism
is the
view that different groups, e.g., those with very different languages
or cultures, may have rather different central concepts and that this
can lead their members to rather different conceptions of the world.
Conceptual relativism can be quite global, applying to concepts across
the board, but it also comes in more local versions that apply to more
limited domains like ethics or science; for example, Kuhn tells us that
what characterizes scientific revolutions is “change in several
of the taxonomic categories prerequisite to scientific descriptions and
generalization” (2000, p. 30).

Descriptive conceptual relativism
is the empirical thesis that members of at least some different groups,
e.g., some cultures, linguistic communities or biological species, have
interestingly different sets of central concepts. For example, it is
generally agreed our modern concept of individual rights did not exist
in the Ancient world. More controversially, Whorf (1959, pp. 59, 147,
215) tells us that where modern speakers of English think of many of
the things in the external world as falling under the concept of an
enduring object (rocks, horses), the Hopi instead think of the things
in their world as falling under the concept of an event or
happening.

What about normative conceptual relativism? Concepts have many uses,
and there is no single sense in which these can be correct or
incorrect; furthermore, some of these senses are uncontroversial. We all
misclassify things now and then, and sometimes we do so systematically.
For example, if someone is under the misapprehension that the concept
of a score applies to a period of fifteen years (so that four score and
seven years is sixty-seven years), they simply get things wrong when
they deploy the concept of a score.

But when people discuss conceptual relativism they often have a more
interesting and more controversial idea in mind. They want to deny that
any system or framework of concepts is correct in the sense of
matching or fitting or corresponding to the structure of the world.
There
simply are no concepts that divide
things up into groups in a way that corresponds to the way things are
truly divided up in nature; to adapt Plato's metaphor, there are no
concepts that carve reality at its joints (Phaedrus, 265e). In
this metaphor reality is like a chicken; there are real joints out
there, facts about which things there are, independently of how we
parcel things out in thought. This is what the conceptual relativist
typically wants to deny.

The inability to achieve a match with reality is not a defect in our
concepts, however, but arises because the world does not come with
prepackaged or preindividuated objects exemplifying prefabricated
properties and standing in prefabricated relations. Hence this sort of
relativism often goes hand in hand with a general sort of relativism
about truth and reality. I have separated it here, however, because
discussions of conceptual relativism are common and because some
partisans of conceptual pluralism want to defend a view of roughly this
sort while rejecting other central species of relativism.

Normative conceptual relativism,
in the sense we will use here, is the philosophical thesis that no
single set of central concepts is correct in any framework-independent
sense, although a set of concepts may be correct relative to a
framework. The normative conceptual relativist often adds that our
concepts could never be read off from, or even match, the structure of
reality, arguing that instead the notions of structure or similarity or
kinds are features of our descriptions and thoughts, rather than
features of some mind- and language-independent reality
“in-itself.” To be sure, some schemes of classification
strike us as much more natural, simple, or useful than others. But
naturalness, simplicity, and usefulness are our values, not the
world's.

Classification is rarely an end in itself, and concepts underlie all
of our higher mental processes, including inference, prediction,
planning, learning, and explanation. The use of concepts (and the
information we associate with them) to mediate ampliative
inferences subserves many of these other uses, enabling us to
apply what we have learned to new and novel cases. When I see that the
creature under the rock is a rattlesnake, I immediately infer
that it is dangerous.

The members of any very large group of items can be classified or
sorted in many different ways, and so many different schemes of
classification are possible. But our concepts also determine what
things we think are out there waiting to be sorted. Whether we think we
have the same thing or something new, one thing or more, depends on
which sortal concept we have in mind: this is the same song,
but a different verse; same novel, new chapter; same type,
different token.

In short, different systems of concepts may sort the same group of
pre-individuated things in different ways, but they may also divide the
world up into different numbers of things. Indeed, the central role of
concepts in the individuation and demarcation of things plays a large
role in many arguments for
reality relativism.
Hilary Putnam expresses the general sentiment this way:

‘Objects’ do not exist independently of
conceptual schemes. We cut up the world into objects when we
introduce one or another scheme of description (1981, p. 52).

If, as I maintain, ‘objects’ themselves are as much
made as discovered, as much products of our conceptual
invention as of the ‘objective’ factor in
experience, the factor independent of our will, then of course objects
intrinsically belong under certain labels because those labels are just
the tools we use to construct a version of the world with such
objects in the first place (1981, p. 54, italics his).

In such argument we move (by steps that are not always very clear) from
the fact that introducing a concept for a kind of thing allows us to
individuate things of that kind to a conclusion to the effect that the
introduction or use of such concepts plays a role in creating the
things in its extension.

It is natural to suppose that if we could come to understand the
concepts of some exotic culture or group we could express their
concepts in terms we understand--and so their conceptual framework
really wouldn't really be very different from our own after all.
Even
if
two groups share certain concepts,
however, they may use them in quite different ways, and this
could lead them to quite different conceptions of the world.

Applying vs. Not Applying
The most obvious conceptual difference between two groups with the
same concept occurs when one group applies a concept to a wide range of
things they deem important but the other group doesn't apply it to
anything at all. Many historians understand what the divine right of
kings was supposed to involve, but few people nowadays think that this
concept has any instances. Or one group may apply a concept much more
widely than another; for example, the concept of a person would be
applied more widely in an animistic culture than in our own.

Applying with Ease vs. Applying with Difficulty
Even when two groups have many of the same concepts, there can be
differences in how accessible those concepts are to them, how natural
it is to use them, whether they are be used by automatically and by
default or only with effort and care. Differences in which concepts are
applied by default, habitually or automatically could, if large enough,
lead to rather different conceptions of the world. Someone who believed
in a world full of magic and spirits and witchcraft might automatically
think of disease as the result of witchcraft, whereas a mildly
superstitious person might only entertain this possibility as a last
resort.

Projecting vs. Not Projecting
Two groups might be able to express all of one another's concepts
but
project
different concepts. For example, we can imagine a group that projects
the concepts grue and bleen rather than our green and blue.

An object is grue just in case it is observed before 2010
and is green, or else is not so observed and is blue.

An object is bleen just in case it is observed before 2010
and is blue, or else is not so observed and is green.

Figure 3: Grue and Bleen Defined in Terms of Green and
Blue

Figure 4: Green and Blue Defined in Terms of Grue and
Bleen

We
canexpress the
other group's concepts in terms of ours and, at the cost of
eccentricity and circumlocution, we could even use their
concepts to classify things. What we cannot do is project grue
and bleen (at least not without massive, compensatory changes in our
overall set of concepts, beliefs, and inductive practices). It is both
normatively incorrect for us to project such concepts (it violates our
standards for good inductive inferences), and it would in fact be very
difficult to bring ourselves to do so, to believe viscerally that grass
is grue and the sky is bleen.

In short, it is one thing to be able to express a given
concept and quite another to be able to use it easily, by default, to
project it, or even to apply it to anything at all.

The descriptive claim that different groups in fact employ somewhat
different sets of concepts leads only to a conceptual pluralism that is
quite compatible with a robust realism about the things the concepts
apply to. But our uses of concepts are bound up with our beliefs and
practices in many ways, and we will see that conceptual relativism can
be used, in conjunction with additional (not always terribly plausible)
premises, to defend other types of relativism as well.

Much twentieth-century philosophy took what is often called the
linguistic turn, with questions about properties and concepts
being replaced by questions about words and linguistic usage. During
this period, conceptual relativism was often transformed into a
relativism involving linguistic meanings. For example, some
philosophers spoke of the role of language or, more generally, systems
of symbols in structuring our experience, thought, or even reality
itself. One can find strains of this in Wittgenstein (e.g., 1969) and
Carnap (1950), and it is explicit in Goodman (e.g., 1978). No one could
now seriously suggest that most philosophical problems are at bottom
problems about language, and concepts are once again respectable. But
there is a substantial philosophical literature in which the points
made here about concepts and relativism were translated into a
linguistic mode as parallel points about words and relativism.

A central belief or, to use Kant's term, principle
is one that a person could not abandon without having to surrender many
other beliefs as well. For most of us these include the beliefs that at
least some events have causes and that other people have feelings and
emotions. Even if we could somehow divest ourselves of such beliefs,
doing so would leave us with a very different picture of the world from
the one most of us have now. As is often the case in discussions of
relativism, a distinction between descriptive and normative
considerations is relevant here. We can distinguish beliefs that a
person or group would in fact have great difficulty giving up, those
they should, by their standards, have great difficulty giving
up, and even those they should, by our standards, have great
difficulty giving up.

Descriptive relativism with respect to central beliefs
is the empirical thesis that certain groups in
fact have different central beliefs. For example, the belief that all
of nature is alive may be central in an animistic culture but is not
central to, or even held by, many people in the Western world today.
The belief in causal determinism may have been central among physicists
during the eighteenth century but is not central among physicists now.
The belief that all people are of equal moral worth is central to some
people now, but wasn't central to many in ancient Sparta.

Normative relativism with respect to central beliefs
is the thesis that there is no
framework-independent fact about which central beliefs are right, but
that such beliefs can be right or wrong relative to a framework. The
unqualified claim that any belief, even those that are inconsistent,
could be correct relative to some framework or other is too
strong to be plausible, but more modest versions of normative
relativism about belief are possible. For a belief to be correct is for
it to be true, so normative relativism about belief amounts to a
normative relativism about truth. But since relative truth is the major
flash point in discussions of relativism, we will single it out for
special attention
below.

Perception
is the interface between
cognition and reality. Descriptive perceptual relativism is
the empirical claim that certain groups (e.g., those with different
cultures, languages, biological makeup) perceive the world differently.
As we will see
below,
for example, various
philosophers of science have argued that theory influences perception
to such an extent that partisans of substantially different theories
might literally see the world differently.

Descriptive claims about perception are sometimes thought to bear on
various versions of normative relativism. For example, some writers
have argued that people with different concepts and beliefs will
nevertheless perceive the same things in the much same way and that
these common perceptions can be used as a fixed point from which to
adjudicate the claims of rival frameworks. Most philosophers and vision
scientists today now agree, though, that perception is
theory-laden; our perceptual experiences in a given situation
are influenced by the concepts, beliefs, expectations and, perhaps,
even the hopes and desires, which we bring to the situation.

Normative perceptual relativism
is the claim that there is not just one
correct, framework-independent way to perceive things. But different
ways are correct relative to different constellations of concepts and
beliefs. Given modern medical training and practice, a competent
radiologist should see that this spot on the X-ray is a stomach tumor,
and anyone with any sensitivity should see that Sam felt
humiliated.

As with most versions of normative relativism, the strongest
versions of normative perceptual relativism, ones on which
“anything goes,” are implausible; there clearly are
constraints on the perception. But weaker versions of the thesis may be
defensible. Perception is theory-laden to some degree; it involves what
current vision scientists call top down processing. (See Section
1.1 of the supplementary document
Relativism and the Constructive Aspects of Perception
for more on top-down processing and the theory-ladenness of perception);
see Section 4 of that same supplement for more on
perceptual relativism; and see Section 5.2 below
for an argument
against stronger versions of perceptual relativism.)

Epistemology (from the Greek episteme,
‘knowledge’, and logos, ‘theory’), or
the theory of knowledge, is the area of philosophy that deals
with knowledge and related concepts like justification and rationality.
On a broad but natural construal, the epistemic realm includes
standards or norms for justification and reasoning (e.g., logic,
probability theory, guidelines for revising beliefs), ideals of
rationality, standards for intelligibility and explanation, epistemic
commitments and values (e.g., learning the truth, gaining insight,
avoiding error, avoiding ignorance), virtues (e.g., being open-minded)
and vices (e.g., having a tendency to jump to conclusions). This is a
mixed bag, and one can be a relativist about some of the things in it
(e.g., standards of explanation) but not others (e.g., logic).

Many of these things, particularly rationality and justification,
are far from clear or univocal. Thus specific beliefs and decisions,
ways of arriving at beliefs, policies for making decisions,
individuals, groups, and (perhaps) even goals, emotions, and desires
are often evaluated as rational or irrational. Moreover, there is
intense controversy over what rationality in each of these cases
involves; for example, there is debate over whether rational action
requires some sort of maximization or optimization, or whether
something more modest will suffice. Again, there is debate over whether
rationality only involves formal notions like logical consistency and
probabilistic coherence, or whether it involves something more
substantive. And our concepts of justification are as multifaceted and
subject to controversy as our concepts of rationality.

Many writers have made striking claims about the epistemic diversity
among human beings. For example, Jean Piaget and various other
developmental psychologists have suggested that children employ a logic
unlike that used by adults (1972, p. 163). And C. I. Lewis was
inspired to develop several relativistic themes in detail by his work
on alternative (in his case modal) logics, which convinced him that the
ultimate criteria for selecting a logical system--or any other sort of
system of concepts and standards--are pragmatic (e.g., 1923,
p. 232; 1929). (See the supplementary document
Arguments and Inferences
for a brief account of logic, arguments, and
inference.)

Many
discussions
of
relativism in the earlier part of the twentieth century focused on the
French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's (1922/1978) claim that
members of preliterate (then called “primitive”) cultures
had a “pre-logical mentality” that led them to reason in
ways that differ from modes of reasoning common in modern Western
cultures. Lévy-Bruhl's opponents countered with the thesis of
the “psychic unity of mankind.” Various later writers urged
“that standards of rationality in different societies do not
always coincide” (Winch, 1970, p. 97), sometimes adding that
different cultures have different standards of rationality that make
good sense in the rich cultural contexts in which they occur, even if
they look odd to us when wrenched out of that
context.
In a related spirit, the historian and
philosopher of science Larry Laudan (1977, p. 187) urges that
“specific canons of rationality are time-dependent. A
mode of argument which one epoch, or ‘school of thought,’
views as entirely legitimate and reasonable may be viewed by another
era or another intellectual tradition as ill-founded and
obscurantist.”

Concepts and beliefs can have histories, and so can epistemic
standards and sensibilities, with what counts as justification,
evidence, or reasonableness shifting over time. For example,
Aristotle's picture of what it takes to justify a scientific theory
(roughly deduction from necessary, self-evident premises) differs
markedly from our picture today (roughly testing by making predictions
and seeing whether they pan out). The precise and formal conception of
probability common today only emerged around 1660, and inferential
statistics and experimental design, which now play an absolutely
central role in the inductive practices in scientific and medical
research, are almost exclusively the product of the last hundred
years.

Epistemic standards are not limited to the sorts of things codified
in normative models like deductive logic, decision theory, or normative
philosophy of science. The epistemic individualism, so pronounced in
modern philosophers from Descartes to Kant, can lead us to overlook the
fact that most of what we know we learned from others. But in many
less-secular, more-traditional cultures, tradition and authority may
play an especially dominant role, overriding virtually all other
epistemic considerations. Thus, a culture or subculture may believe
that the most secure basis for knowledge is faith or divine revelation
or some authoritative person (e.g., Aristotle, a shaman, the Pope
speaking ex cathedra), text (e.g., the Bible, the
Qur'an) or practice (e.g., the deliverances of an oracle), and
that their pronouncements cannot be overturned by any other methods
(e.g., empirical science). For example, modern views about creationism
are sometimes based on the view that the Bible provides a more
accurate account of our origins than geology and biology ever
could.

Standards of justification and norms of rationality are sometimes
construed as rules or even algorithms (e.g., modus ponens or
existential generalization for deductive logic; Bayesian
conditionalization or Jeffrey conditionalization for updating
probabilities of beliefs). But some of our epistemic standards and
practices are also more indefinite than the picture of formal rules and
procedures might suggest. They are more like rules or thumb or
heuristics or even embody procedural knowledge that is difficult to
express precisely in words. Indeed, to the extent that
connectionist systems
provide good models
of various aspects of human reasoning, our standards may be quite
amorphous and indefinite.

By analogy with the notions of central concepts and beliefs, we may
call a group's more fundamental epistemic standards central or
framework standards; as with their counterparts, centrality
here is a matter of degree.

Descriptive epistemic relativism
about a given mode of inference or reasoning (e.g., deductive
inference, causal reasoning, contingency planning) is an empirical
claim to the effect that certain groups in fact employ different
central standards for evaluating that type of reasoning.

Much of the literature on descriptive relativism in the first
two-thirds of the twentieth century was based on uncritical and poorly
supported claims about the patterns of reasoning of educated people in
modern Western societies. The last three decades have seen a great deal
of empirical work on reasoning in our culture, but although we know
more now than we did thirty years ago, many of the most basic matters
remain controversial (for a general discussion see Swoyer, 2002). These
difficulties in getting clear about our own modes and norms of
reasoning suggest a measure of skepticism when we encounter glib
descriptions of the exotic reasoning patterns of members of quite alien
cultures or groups.

Normative epistemic relativism
is
the claim that there are no framework-independent facts about which
modes of inference, norms of justification, standards of rationality or
the like are right, but that there are facts about such things
relative to particular frameworks. Put another way, people or groups
can disagree about what counts as good evidence or strong justification
without being inconsistent, irrational, unintelligent, unjustified, or
even just obtuse. Epistemic standards have a strong normative
dimension--we use our standards of rationality and reasonableness to
guide, evaluate, and criticize reasoning, both our own and that of
others--so here the label ‘normative’ applies in a very
full-blooded sense. And if knowledge requires justification, as many
philosophers suppose, then relativism about justification also leads to
relativism about knowledge.

Normative epistemic relativism is one of the most interesting and
important species of relativism. The strongest versions, ones that
allow any epistemic standards or norms, even those that are
blatantly inconsistent by their own lights, to be correct relative to
some framework or other are implausible. But a number of
writers endorse more subtle versions, or at least pay lip service to
them, and it is not as easy as one might suppose to show that all of
these are false. It is not easy, for example, to devise non-circular
defenses of some of our more fundamental epistemic standards and
practices like induction (see the supplementary document
Justifying Epistemic Norms
for a brief discussion of the justification of
epistemic norms).

This does not mean that the normative epistemic relativist wins by
default, since she must defend a realism account about
framework-immanent correctness in addition to an anti-realism about
framework-transcendent correctness, but her claims cannot be dismissed
out of hand.

Although normative epistemic relativism has attracted numerous
proponents, we will see that problems of
self-refutation
threaten stronger versions
of the view that are just as severe as the problems of self-refutation
that beset the doctrine of
relative truth.

Our ethical lives involve principles, rules, commitments, rights,
duties, ideals, virtues, modes of justifying and criticizing ethical
claims, and doubtless other things as well. It is possible to be a
relativist about some of these (e.g., what constitutes a good or
worthwhile life) but not about others (e.g., rights).

The phrases ‘ethical relativism’ and ‘moral
relativism’ are sometimes used interchangeably, but it is useful
to distinguish them because morality is often characterized as a part
of ethics, that involving obligations, rights, and justice, whereas
other parts of ethics concern such things as what constitutes a good
life or human flourishing (Aristotle's eudaimonia).

Descriptive ethical relativism
is
the empirical claim that certain groups differ along one or more
ethical dimensions. For example, it is often said that modern Western
cultures count individualism, autonomy, and personal dignity as key
values, where certain other cultures see group solidarity or placating
the Gods as more important. Again, one group may view meekness,
humility, and submissiveness to the group as virtues, where another
emphasizes heroism and pride. Such differences in moral concepts,
values, and practices could also give rise to differences in moral
perception and moral sensibilities.

Normative ethical relativism
is
the claim that what is right or just or virtuous or good only holds
within, relative to, a particular ethical framework.

Ethical (or moral) relativism is the topic of a separate entry, and
we will only advert to it when it is helpful to note its similarities
to, or difference from, other species of relativism.

There are various ways to be a relativist about the semantics of
natural languages, i.e., about the meanings of words, phrases, and
sentences in a languages like English or Choctaw. Some of these are
fairly trivial, but others are more interesting, in part because they
are frequently invoked in defense of other relativistic themes. The
distinction between descriptive and normative relativism may be less
clear cut here than in other cases, but it can still be usefully
drawn.

Descriptive semantic relativism,
as we will use the phrase, is the empirical claim
that different groups, e.g., people living at different times or in
different cultures, sometimes have different beliefs about the meaning
of a word (where words are individuated independently of their meanings
by such things as pronunciation or spelling). For example, as we will
see below, some philosophers of science urge that scientists in the
late seventeenth century used the word ‘mass' so differently from the
way physicists use it today that members of the two groups think of the
word as having different meanings.

Normative semantic relativism
is the view that the meanings of words literally are
determined by a linguistic community, culture, or historical period. So
if two communities overlap enough to have the same word (individuated
without recourse to meanings), it is possible that it will
have different meanings in the two communities. For example, some
philosophers argue that in the Newtonian framework ‘mass’
has one meaning (e.g., it denotes a physical magnitude that isn't
affected by velocity) and in today's physical framework it has a
different meaning. Similarly, it is sometimes urged that the meanings
of logical connectives (e.g., ‘not’, ‘if’,
‘some’) is relative to alternative logical frameworks like
intuitionism or classical logic (see Section 2.1 of the supplementary
document
Arguments and Inferences
for more on this).

More global versions of normative semantic relativism sometimes
arise in debates about the meanings of texts (like novels and epic
poems). Originally such concerns involved Biblical interpretation, but
in the nineteenth century Schleiermacher, Dilthey and others extended
interpretive or hermeneutical concerns to all texts (and some
contemporary literary theorists have extended the notion of a text, so
that it needn't even involve anything linguistic). Interpretive work
needn't involve strong versions of normative semantical relativism, but
it sometimes does, particularly in postmodernist literary or cultural
theory (“every interpretation is just a
reinterpretation”).

Virtually everyone would agree that the meanings of words are in
some way determined by the practices and beliefs of the
members of the linguistic community who uses them. The important point
for strong and interesting versions of semantic relativism is the
form this determination takes. On relativistic accounts it
typically involves a semantic holism to the effect that the
denotations, or at least the meanings in some more general sense, of
linguistic expressions are determined by their overall role in a
language (theory, form of life, etc.). Indeed, the semantic relativist
often continues, the denotations or meanings of the expressions of one
language cannot be expressed in any but the most approximate way in a
substantially different language. Semantic relativism, so construed, is
more a linguistic thesis than an overt species of relativism, but there
are interesting parallels with other species or relativism and, more
importantly, it is frequently invoked in defenses of other species.

The notion of linguistic meaning is multifaceted and subject to
endless controversy, but most thinkers agree that meaning, denotation
(i.e., reference), and truth, are key semantic notions. We will begin
with the intuitive but somewhat amorphous notion of meaning, focusing
on the ways relativism about it are frequently invoked to defend other
relativistic themes. Relativism about
truth
and
relativism about
denotation
are discussed
below.

The most widely-discussed form of semantic relativism in recent
decades is the doctrine of the incommensurability of meaning championed
by Thomas Kuhn (e.g., 1970b), Paul Feyerabend (e.g., 1962), who cites
Whorf in support, and several other philosophers of science in the
1960s. Although their views became more nuanced over the years, their
early proposal was that the terms (e.g., ‘mass’,
‘gene’,‘temperature’, ‘electron’)
of scientific paradigms (Kuhn) or high-level background theories
(Feyerabend) draw their meaning from their location or overall role in
that paradigm or theory.

When a scientific paradigm or theory changes substantially, as
happens during a scientific revolution, scientists change their mind
about the truth values of many of the most important sentences or
beliefs involving these terms (e.g., “the mass of an object is
the same relative to all inertial frames”), and surprising new
claims employing such terms many be added to the picture. Hence, the
argument continues, the role of such terms changes, and with it so do
their meanings. This is a version of semantic or meaning
holism, the view that the meaning of linguistic phrases and
sentences is determined by their place in the overall web of beliefs or
sentences that comprise a theory or, at the limit, an entire
worldview.

If the thesis of meaning holism is right, then substantially
different theories cannot contain words or phrases that have the same
meanings. It follows, proponents of incommensurability add, that in
such cases the claims of competing theorists cannot be compared,
because even when they seem to be using the same word, e.g., when
Newton and Einstein use the word ‘mass’, it means different
things. Rather than disagreeing, proponents of competing theories
simply talk about different things--and past each other. And so it is
that their claims and beliefs and theories are incommensurable.

It is also possible to formulate a holistic account of belief or
mental content, so that the meaning or content of a belief is
determined by its place in a large web of beliefs, and to develop an
account of incommensurability and relativism in terms of concepts
rather than worlds. Most of the issues that concern us here are similar
in either case, however, and much of what follows applies to the
content of concepts and beliefs as well as to the meanings of words and
sentences.

Sometimes relativism is simply equated with the view that
there are, or could be, completely incommensurable frameworks. This
extreme view, which is rarely defended in any detail, has little to
recommend it because it simply dismisses many interesting versions of
relativism. Still, incommensurability theses do support some
varieties of descriptive relativism, since groups with quite different
outlooks would have quite different frameworks of concepts, standards,
and beliefs.

The meanings, concepts, and beliefs of very different cultures are
also sometimes said to be incommensurable. For example, it might be
argued that our word ‘rights’ (or, on more mentalistic
accounts, our concept of individual rights) derives its meaning from
its relationships to our other words or concepts (e.g., liberty,
obligation, autonomy, equality), beliefs (e.g., people should be
allowed some control over their own lives), and practices (e.g., our
system of laws and sanctions).

But if the meanings and concepts and beliefs and traditions and
practices of another culture are substantially different from our own,
it follows that none of their words (or complex phrases) line
up well enough with the meaning of our word ‘rights’
for us to accurately interpret them as having any phrases or concepts
that are genuine counterparts of our word or concept, or as having any
beliefs about rights. Similarly, this line of thought can be continued,
another group might have quite different meanings or concepts when it
comes to causation, epistemic evaluation, or even
logic
(cf. Winch, 1970 §1). And if this is so,
it leads to a descriptive relativism about concepts, logical
principles, or the like, as well as to
weak truth-value relativism.
(We turn to criticisms of such views
below.)

The influential American philosopher W. V. O. Quine is well known for
his thesis of the inscrutability of reference and its
attendant notions of the indeterminacy of translation and
ontological relativity. These labels may conjure up visions of
an extreme relativism in which ontology (i.e., what exists) is relative
to languages or frameworks. In fact, though, Quine's views are a form
of antirealism about both semantic and mentalistic notions that would
simply undercut many forms of relativism. The thesis of the
inscrutability of reference tells us that it makes no sense to say
absolutely, i.e., in any language or framework-independent sense, what
objects a speaker is talking about. For example, there is no
language-transcendent fact as to whether someone pointing in the
direction of a rabbit is speaking of enduring physical objects
(rabbits) or events (temporal stages of rabbits).

Hence, far from supporting most varieties of relativism, Quine's
views actually undermine them, since there is no longer any absolute
fact about what the speakers of different languages or members of
different cultures think and talk about, and hence no fact that they
think in interestingly different ways. It is not that the native--or
anyone else's--mind is inscrutable, Quine tells us, but that there is
simply “nothing to scrute” (1969, p. 5; cf. p. 27 and
1960, p. 58 and p. 77). Nor is there any absolute fact to scrute about
the denotation of the native's words or the contours of his
worldview.

Much
of
our thought and action takes place
against a background of common but tacit assumptions, understandings,
intuition, attitudes, concerns, skills, and other ways of coping with
the world around us. These are largely unarticulated, perhaps sometimes
not articulable, and often difficult to identify. They include
inferential and other cognitive habits, automatic ways of interpreting
things, and the concepts it is second nature to project.

The claim that explicit beliefs and reasoning do not tell the whole
story about our mental lives is not just some esoteric bit of theory.
Few of us see our abilities to speak our native language or to
recognize facial expressions in terms of precepts or rules, and
cognitive scientists who have tried to write explicit rules to simulate
these skills inevitably find it very difficult to do. Some aspects of
practice, e.g., the ways we individuate things into physical objects,
may be part of our biological heritage, but other aspects differ from
one group to another. Practice is in some ways more naturally viewed as
an independent variable (e.g., as an aspect of culture or form of
life), but in some ways it also works like a dependent variable, so it
is useful to introduce it here.

One would expect an emphasis on practice in Marxist writings on
praxis and pragmatists' writings on inquiry and education, but many
other writers have stressed it as well. Aristotle emphasizes the
importance of practical wisdom (phronesis), the ability to
judge what to do in concrete situations, and because practical wisdom
cannot be reduced to formal directives, he emphasizes that education
should aim to inculcate habits and promote the internalization of ways
of seeing and feeling and acting, rather than simply to impart
rules.

Much more recently Michael Polanyi (1958) has argued that we know
more than we can tell and that this tacit knowledge underlies all of
our more explicit knowledge. Related themes surface in Gilbert Ryle's
distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that, in Pierre Bourdieu's
notion of habitus, in Thomas Kuhn's likening the learning of
science to an apprenticeship in which one acquires not just explicit
knowledge, but also habits and skills. And various philosophers (e.g.,
Searle, 1983, Ch. 5) have argued that an inexplicit, unarticulated, and
perhaps even non-representational background of assumptions,
presuppositions, ways of perceiving, and modes of acting underlie our
all our knowledge and evaluation.

This emphasis on practice—on engagement, judgment, and
action—is a useful corrective to what Dewey excoriated as
spectator theories of knowledge that portray human beings in too
passive a way and that still mar some treatments of relativism.

Descriptive relativism about practice
is the empirical claim that certain groups have
different practices of the sort that lead to different modes of thought
and evaluation. On such pictures one might think of cultures, say, as
determining practices, which in turn determine modes of classification
and evaluation. But it would be more accurate to see cultural practices
and modes of classification and evaluation as aspects of the same thing
that we separate, somewhat artificially, for purposes of
discussion.

Normative relativism about practice
is the claim that there can be framework-dependent,
but no framework-independent, facts as to which practices are right.
The notion of a practice being right in some framework-independent
sense is not particularly clear, but examples give us some purchase on
the idea. Thus Goodman argues that there is no framework-transcendent
fact that people should
project
the concept green rather than grue. Still,
it would be incorrect for us, with our current inductive
practices, to do so. Goodman urges that which predicates are
projectible--for us, here, now--depends in part on the inductive
practices of our community, on which predicates its members have
successfully projected in the past. Indeed, the history of our
practices determines which categories are right for a variety of
purposes (e.g., Goodman, 1984, pp. 120-124; 1978,
p. 138).

Ludwig Wittgenstein's treatment of practice is especially important.
He argues that justifications and reasons do not bottom out in
arguments or beliefs or principle, but in the fact that we behave in
the ways that we do, in our form of life, in the practices we have. For
example, at some point our applications of rules and standards rests on
the fact that we (typically) agree about what counts as going on in the
same way or what makes for a correct application of a rule in a novel
situation. Some aspects of our form of life may be common to all normal
adult human beings, but others may vary across groups. The first two
passages are from Wittgenstein's On Certainty, the next two
from the Philosophical Investigations.

¶110. What counts as its test? “But is this an
adequate test? And, if so, must it not be recognizable as such in
logic?”--As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime.
But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded
way of acting.

¶204 Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to
an end;--but the end is not certain propositions' striking us
immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is
our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game.

¶217 If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached
bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This
is simply what I do.”

What has to be accepted, the given, is--so one could say--forms
of life (Pt. II, p. 226).

Practice suffuses all aspects of culture and thought and evaluation,
but it is worth singling it out because its very ubiquity makes it easy
to overlook.

Truth
is
important because it is a major
goal of inquiry, a central component of knowledge, the thing
justification is supposed to track, what valid arguments preserve,
perhaps (in the form of truth conditions) a component of linguistic
meanings and, for many people, a valuable end in itself. Philosophers
call truth and falsity truth values, so it is natural to call
relativism about truth truth-value relativism.

Normative truth-value relativism
is the claim that tokens of sentences, beliefs or the like are only
true relative to a framework. Thus Kuhn says “If I am right, then
‘truth’ may, like ‘proof’, be a term with only
intra-theoretical applications” (1970a, p. 266).
Normative
truth-value
relativism comes in two versions.
Theweak
version is the claim that there may be things that are true in one
framework that are not true in a second simply because they are not
expressible in the second. The
strong version,
which receives the most attention, is the claim that
one and the same thing, e.g., one and the same belief, can be true in
one framework and false in another.

Relativism about truth boils down to relativism about belief, but
rather different sets of issues are typically connected with
central beliefs
or principles, on the one hand, and
issues about relative truth, on the other. The first set of issues
involves what I will call framework principles, very general
principles (e.g., every event has a cause) that guide classification
and inquiry. By contrast, the second set of issues involves the strong
version of normative truth-value relativism quite explicitly. Since the
two sets of issues are rather different, we treat them separately
here.

Truth is a major flash point in discussions of relativism. The
traditional indictment of the strong version of truth-value relativism
is that it is self-refuting. The claim that truth is relative is, by
the relativist's own lights, only true relative to some frameworks and
it may be false relative to others. Hence, it is argued, the relativist
cannot account for the status of his own claims. We examine this
objection in
§5.9.

In
a
phrase so arresting it couldn't help
but catch on, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) spoke of the
social construction of reality. The term suggests that the
world, reality itself, is in some measure the product of our
cognitive activity. Such views have gone by various names, including
metaphysical relativism and constructivism, and they
are the most extreme forms of relativism that there are. I will call
the general
viewreality
relativism.

Descriptive reality relativism
is
the empirical claim that certain groups think about, or experience, the
world as involving certain things (e.g., physical objects) whereas
other groups think or experience it differently (e.g., events). This
claim overlaps descriptive relativism with respect to concepts,
beliefs, and perception, and so is not of great independent
interest.

Normative reality relativism
is
the view that what is real is somehow relative to a framework.
But what could this mean? Perhaps in some sense we use concepts to
construct the world, but no one supposes that the world is
literally composed of concepts. It is tempting, and often
best, to regard talk of social construction as a metaphor that is meant
to suggest some less hyperbolic doctrine, e.g., that people with quite
different concepts will think about things in different ways.

There is no escaping the fact, however, that some very able thinkers,
from Immanuel Kant to Nelson Goodman, have held the stronger view that
the mind plays an essential role in the construction of the
objects of knowledge. This is not to say that it constructs them out of
nothing; most thinkers who adopt this line urge that there is some sort
of input or raw material that we shape, not with our hands or coping
saws or lathes, but with our concepts and beliefs and cognitive
practices. Here a common theme, noted
above,
is that the individuation of the raw
material into things requires the imposition of concepts on it.

On the face of it, the view that reality is socially constructed
seems so peculiar that it is worth documenting that a wide range of
thinkers have said things that at least strongly suggest it (see
the supplementary document
The Cognitive Construction of Reality
for some smoking-gun
passages). The greatest difficulty with normative reality relativism is
making sense of it, with finding a version of it that does some justice
to the claims of thinkers sympathetic to it without being incoherent
when we turn to the details. We will return to this in
§4.

Other things, including aesthetic standards, emotions, personality
structure, memory, strategies for solving problem, motivation, decision
making, social cognition, and even sense of humor, have been claimed to
be relative in interesting ways. In her famous work, for example,
Margaret Mead claimed to find differences in personality structure
between adolescents in American and Samoa. But the variables discussed
above have received the greatest attention in discussions of
relativistic themes. Table One displays these nine independent
variables, along with a few illustrative subtypes (qualifiers like
‘central’ and ‘basic’ are omitted; not all of
the subtypes discussed, much less all of those that might be
distinguished, will easily fit into a readable tree). Each type and
subtype comes in a descriptive and in a normative version.

The goal here is to facilitate discussion rather than to give a
taxonomy of mutually exclusive positions, and in fact there are areas
of overlap among some of these species of relativism. For example,
normative truth-value relativism about ethics overlaps normative
ethical relativism. The best way of thinking about a view in the region
of overlap often depends on the purposes at hand, e.g., whether we are
primarily interested in the ethical aspects of the view or whether we
are interested in comparing different types of relativism about
truth.

The precise relationships among various types of relativism, e.g.,
between conceptual relativism and epistemic relativism, depend on the
detailed way in which the view is developed, but there are affinities
between several types of relativism as they are most commonly
construed.

Some connections exist because we have abstracted away from the rich
texture of peoples' thought and life. For example, talk of ethical or
epistemic or legal or religious realms may suggest a sort of
compartmentalization that rarely exists in actual life. People often
have a multiplicity of concerns at any given time, and in many cases
the boundaries between various sorts of considerations and
reasons--e.g., the prudential, the epistemic, the ethical--are blurry.
Indeed, it is sometimes even unclear whether some aspect of a person's
cognitive life is best construed as a rule, value, or a higher-order
belief. For example, a person's commitment to
modus ponens
might be construed as a logical rule that they endorse,
or as the belief that if a conditional and its antecedent are
both true, its consequent must be true as well.

Various species of relativism support one another, although this
support often falls short of entailment. Here we note just a few of the
potential connections among various species of relativism.

Concepts, Beliefs, and Perception:Relativism
about
concepts or beliefs is connected, rather trivially, to other kinds of
relativism because all of them involve concepts and beliefs. For
example, groups with rather different ethical or epistemic concepts are
likely to have somewhat different epistemic standards and values. More
substantively, if certain empirical claims about the theory-ladenness of
perception are true, relativism about concepts and beliefs leads to
perceptual relativism.

Epistemic Relativism:Our
epistemic standards
and practices are interwoven with our concepts. Indeed, a central task
of concepts is to mediate inferences. Furthermore, the concepts we
project
partially determine
which ampliative inferences we sanction. These inferences can also
depend on a background of general beliefs, for example the belief that
the future will be pretty much like the past in ways we consider
relevant or that if two types of events are correlated then either one
causes the other or else they have a
common cause.

Truth-Value Relativism:
Normative relativism
about
epistemic standards does not entail normative relativism about truth or
about reality. It can, however, be combined with other substantive
principles in various ways in arguments designed to support the latter.
First, if truth is explained in partially epistemic terms, e.g., as
what would be warranted or justified under certain idealized conditions
of inquiry, then relativism about standards of warrant or justification
leads naturally to relativism about truth. But even on non-epistemic
conceptions of truth, the view that an epistemic standard is legitimate
only if it is truth-conducive, i.e., only if it tends to lead
to true conclusions when applied to true premises, together with the
view that epistemic standards are relative, can be deployed to argue
for the relativity of truth. The argument can also be run in the
opposite direction, from the claim that truth is relative and that good
epistemic standards are truth conducive, to the conclusion that
epistemic standards are relative.

Reality Relativism:Reality
relativism
supports relativism about many other things. A common argument for
reality relativism, examined below,
turns on the claim that our central concepts and beliefs somehow
structure or shape the world as we know it and that any notion of an
objective world that is entirely independent of the way we know it is
empty and useless. If this is correct, it is tempting to conclude that
the only notion of truth that is not empty and useless is truth about
things with respect to our conceptual framework. On this picture, which
involves a standard
relativistic reconstrual,
the sentence ‘grass is green’ is true
because it corresponds to the facts or fits the world--but since the
only world we can talk or think or know about is the world of our
framework, we must (we are told) conclude that the sentence corresponds
to the facts of that world. Truth makers are relative to frameworks,
and so the only sort of truth we can hope to discover is truth in, or
relative to, a framework.

In this section we examine the chief candidates for relativistic
independent variables. As with the dependent variables, the chief
candidates here are not all independent of one another--language and
religion are important facets of culture, for example--but they are
often singled out for separate treatment, and we begin by following
suite.

While such things are concepts, logical principles, and truth are often
relativized to conceptual frameworks, frameworks in turn are usually
thought to be determined by something else. Issues involving
descriptive relativism are often central in discussions of the
independent variables, since one of the chief questions is whether
(and, if so, how) something like language or culture in fact
influences modes of thought or evaluation. But normative issues often
surface as well.

Relativism as Social. Over two
thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Protagoras declared that man
is the measure of all things. Plato interpreted this as the claim that
what is true is relative to each individual person's beliefs. But
virtually all of the versions of relativism that have been defended in
any detail since Plato's time treat it a social phenomenon,
and almost no later writers take their inspiration from
Protagoras. Instead, members of a group said to have their modes of
thought as part of their social heritage, because of some common
possession like culture or language, or as part of their shared
biological endowment.

Language (along with culture) is the most frequently
discussed independent variable, the thing most commonly said to
influence modes of thought. This can be generalized, as it has by
Nelson Goodman (1978), to the claim that symbol systems--including
computer languages, conventions for diagrams, even styles of
painting--influence perception and thought.

The claim that one's language affects how she experiences and thinks
about the world is known as the linguistic relativity
hypothesis or linguistic relativism (it is also called,
in deference to two prominent proponents, the Whorf hypothesis
or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). It is typically a descriptive
(rather than a normative) claim about the actual influence of human
languages on human thought and experience.

Any serious discussion of linguistic relativism requires us to
answer three questions:

Which aspects of language influence which aspects
of thought in a systematic way?

What form does this influence take?

How strong is the influence?

For example, certain features of a language's syntax (e.g., whether
there is a distinction between intransitive verbs and adjectives) or
its lexicon (e.g., what color words or numerical vocabulary it has)
might be said to influence perception, classification, or memory in
clearly specifiable ways.

As with relativistic claims about the other independent variables,
linguistic relativity hypotheses are claims about causal
influence: one or more aspects of language causally affect one or
more aspects of thought. Such influences can vary in magnitude, so
linguistic relativity hypotheses differ in the strength of the
hypothesized influence. Finally, as with many other versions of
relativism, the weakest versions of linguistic relativism are trivially
true and the strongest versions are known to be false. The important
question is whether interesting versions between these extremes are
true. Current evidence suggests that a person's language does have some
influence on her perception and thought, but that it is much less
dramatic than the more extreme partisans of linguistic relativism have
maintained. (See the supplementary document
The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
for more on linguistic relativism.)

The greatest challenge for proponents of linguistic relativism is to
adduce evidence to show that differences in language actually
lead to differences in thought. This is a problem that arises
for most of the independent variables we will consider, so linguistic
relativism is a good case study for descriptive relativism in general.
The points that emerge from an examination of linguistic relativism are
defended in a
supplement
to this section; the discussion there suggests the following morals for
a number of independent variables, including culture and history, as
well as language.

Questions about the impact of an independent variable on cognition
are empirical and causal questions.

Such questions can only be answered once we specify which
aspects of an independent variable (e.g., the color lexicon,
religious practices) influence which aspects of thought (e.g.,
perception, causal reasoning) and what form the hypothesized influence
takes.

Such hypotheses can vary greatly in specificity, strength, and
scope.

Testing a specific version of a relativity hypothesis requires a
combination of skills. Depending on the type of relativism involved in
may require the expertise of an ethnographer, linguist, experimental
psychologist, historian, or biologist.

A comparison of more than two groups (e.g., linguistic communities,
cultures) is needed to draw any firm conclusions about a descriptive
relativity hypothesis.

The truth of specific relativity hypotheses may turn on issues
involving the
modularity of mind
and the degree of modular
encapsulation. For example, if the mind is highly modular, finding an
influence of one aspect of language or culture of some aspect of
cognition (e.g., language comprehension) may tell us little about the
influence of other aspects of language or culture on other aspects of
cognition (e.g., long-term memory).

Culture is perhaps the most central theoretical concept in
anthropology, and it is important in many of the other social sciences
as well. The nature and role of culture are matters of controversy, but
a quite general characterization will suffice here. Culture is socially
transmitted from one generation to the next. It includes ideals about
how one should live, customs, mores, taken-for-granted common
knowledge, systems of production and exchange, ways of coping with
illness, disease and death, legal institutions, religion, rituals,
rites of passage, myths, taboos, technologies, social hierarchies and
status, sexual practices, accepted ways of displaying emotions,
marriage, kinship structures, power hierarchies, sports, games, art,
architecture, language.

There are always differences in outlooks and beliefs within the same
culture, especially in large and heterogeneous ones, and at some point
the notion of a culture may begin to blur enough that we introduce
notions of like that of a subculture. These also have a certain
haziness (we will return to this
below),
but
useful generalizations about particular cultures are still often
possible.

Cultural relativism is the thesis that a person's culture
strongly influences her modes of perception and thought. Many
anthropologists, particularly in the earlier parts of the twentieth
century, saw culture as a force that was nearly unlimited in its power
to shape human beings.
This
passage, from the influential American anthropologist Ruth Benedict, is
typical:

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees
it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of
thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these
stereotypes …The life-history of the individual is first and
foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally
handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs
into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time
he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time
he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his
habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his
impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will share
them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the
globe can ever achieve the thousandth part (1934,
pp. 2-3).

Amorphous debates over
pre-logical
and
pre-literate modes of thought that were once popular have now given way
to more detailed and precise work in cross-cultural psychology and
cognitive anthropology (see Berry, et al. 1996, Cole, 1996, and
D'Andrade, 1995 for good discussions of the two fields). The extent to
which cultural forces can shape modes of thought is still not fully
understood, but it appears that although there are some modest
cognitive differences between cultures, nothing remotely as dramatic as
the claims made in some of the earlier literature on cultural
relativism have received much support.

Technology and art are products of their times. So are many
concepts, standards, and beliefs. Historical relativism (or
historicism, in one of its many meanings) is the view that
groups from quite different historical epochs will have different modes
of thought. The British philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood
(e.g., 1940, esp. ch. 6) particularly stressed the historical dimension
of relativism, but many other thinkers agreed. Karl Mannheim, the
founder of the sociology of knowledge, put it this way:

When we attribute to one historical epoch one intellectual
world and to ourselves another one, or if a certain historically
determined social stratum thinks in categories other than our own, we
refer not to the isolated cases of thought content, but to
fundamentally divergent thought systems and to widely differing modes
of experience and interpretation (1929/1936, p. 57).

Historical differences are typically thought to stem from cultural and
linguistic differences, so historical relativism does not add anything
radically new to cultural and linguistic relativism. Introducing
history as an independent variable makes a new range of cases relevant,
however, and it means that historical texts and historiography can be
used to study relativistic themes. History has also played a key role
in discussions of more local types of relativism, particularly in
science.

In
his
influential book,
The Whig Interpretation of History, Herbert Butterfield (1931)
made a strong case against the “Wiggish” view that history
involves progressive evolution toward where we are now. This picture is
often another form of ethnocentric projection, and in fact changes of
many sorts occur for many reasons. Still, history sometimes allows us
to see earlier modes of thought as precursors to our own, and this
opens the door to studies of conceptual change. It also holds out the
hope of a sort of self-understanding, some insight into how we came to
be the way we are.

The
nature-nurture debate
is the perennial dispute over the relative strength of
innate biological makeup (nature), on the one hand, and enculturation,
socialization, and other forms of learning (nurture), on the other.
Both are obviously necessary for normal human life, and the debate has
often been confused or oversimplified, with inexact talk about a gene
for this or being “wired up” to do that. Still, there
is a genuine empirical question about the extent of the
malleability vs. the constancy of human nature, about the boundaries of
the biologically possible and the degree to which our biological
makeup, especially the organization of our nervous systems and brains,
underdetermines culture, language, and modes of thought.

During the 1940s and 50s, when behaviorism was dominant in
psychology, linguistics, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) the other
social sciences, the pendulum had swung sharply to the empiricist
(nurture) pole. Very little, save for general learning mechanisms, were
thought to be built into the human mind, and so there was a good deal
of scope for language and culture to shape modes of thought.

In recent decades the pendulum has swung sharply to the opposite
(nature) pole. The pioneering linguist Noam Chomsky emphasized innate
linguistic universals, which this led to a picture of deep commonality
beneath surface differences in languages. And with the increasing
popularity of nativist views in cognitive science, e.g., claims that
the mind comes with a number of innate
modules,
talk of
cognitive universals and pre-configured modules is now common. From
this perspective, a rich cognitive architecture is “wired
in,” so there is less scope for culture or language to influence
how we experience or think about the things.

In the last few years, however, even some of cognitive science's
founders (e.g., Bruner, 1992) have reacted against what they see as its
overemphasis emphasis on information processing and its relative
neglect of culture. Culture is now being worked back into the picture,
and people are once again asking just how much influence it can have on
cognition. Still, although the issues here are difficult and far from
settled, a good deal of empirical work does suggest that the human mind
comes pre-wired in interesting and important ways (e.g., with
predispositions to learn certain kinds of languages, or to recognize
human faces). So it may well turn out that at an abstract, but still
interesting level, people do in fact think in much the same ways. (We
will return to some of these matters
below).

Nativist views of cognition support many sorts of descriptive
relativism with respect to human beings. But they raise the possibility
that certain aspects of human cognition result from the contingent,
often highly accidental, evolutionary history of our species, and if
the similarities among human beings stem from contingent features of
our brain and our sensory apparatus, creatures with quite different
biological makeups might perceive and think in quite different ways.
From this perspective, in fact, the contingent features of our
cognitive architecture may begin to look like limitations.

Even if human nature is strikingly uniform beneath the veneer of
cultural and historical differences, normative issues about
objectivity, justification, and truth also remain. Indeed, nativist
views can accentuate normative issues, since it is possible that human
cognition is less than optimal in various ways; for example,
evolutionary selection pressures may have favored quick and tolerably
accurate cognitive mechanisms over slower but more accurate ones.

If alternative frameworks of central concepts, beliefs, and
standards are possible, can we simply decide which ones to adopt? On
some accounts it is discretionary, a matter of choice or explicit
convention, which categories and principles we employ; this is not to
say that it is arbitrary or capricious, since there may be good
reasons--e.g., simplicity, ease of use, comprehensiveness--for
preferring some choices to others, but we do have some say in the
matter. On other accounts, alternatives may be possible in some
abstract sense, but they are not live options for us.

At the voluntaristic end of the spectrum we find thinkers urging
that there is a great deal of leeway for choice. For example,
existentialists like Sartre hold that there are no objective facts
about moral values and principles, and that we must select them for
ourselves with an existential leap, a fateful existential choice. Many
Anglo-American non-cognitivists about ethics, including Ayer,
Stevenson, and the early Hare held less portentous versions of a
similar view. Going a step further, some of Nietzsche's remarks in his
posthumously edited and published Will to Power (1906/1967)
(which he might not have endorsed) suggest that many other aspects of
cognition are also matters of choice. And, to take a very different
figure, Carnap (1950, §2) tells us that we can choose to speak the
“thing language,” in which physical objects are central,
or a “phenomenalistic language,” in which sense
data are.

Writers at the opposite end of the spectrum argue that it is
difficult, or even impossible, to make substantial changes in our
central concepts, beliefs, and evaluative standards. We cannot simply
decide, for example, to begin thinking about the world in completely
non-causal terms. Indeed, if our most fundamental concepts and beliefs
are part of our biological endowment, it may not be biologically
possible to dispense with then. There would be less scope for changing
the way we experience and think about colors, for example, if certain
aspects of color cognition were determined by the neurophysiology of
our visual system (as the opponent-processes theory suggests) than if
they were determined by the color lexicon of our native language (as
some linguistic relativists supposed).

But many writers who stress nurture over nature also resist the
picture of easy alteration. Some even invoke the language of coercion
to emphasize the point. For example, some early champions of the
linguistic relativity hypothesis employed phrases like
‘linguistic determinism.’ Thus Whorf tells us that
“[n]o individual is free to describe nature with absolute
impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation
[determined by the language he speaks] even while he thinks himself
most free” (1956, p. 214). Benedict makes similar claims
for
culture,
as does Collingwood (1940) for
history. Among other things, these writers urge that our central
concepts and beliefs permeate our thought so thoroughly that it doesn't
even occur to most of us that there could be alternatives.

Between these extremes we find writers who hold that dramatic
revisions of frameworks are occasionally possible, but only in
exceptional circumstances. Speaking of a scientist's choice to embrace
a new paradigm in its early stages, Kuhn tells us that “a
decision of that kind can only be made on faith,” and he
frequently speaks on accepting a new paradigm in terms of faith and
conversion (1970b, p. 158 and pp. 19, 148, 150). Polanyi
(1958, pp. 152f) speaks of conversion in a similar context, and
when imagining a confrontation between people with very difference
cognitive practices. Collingwood (1940, p. 256) speaks of faith in a
similar context. And Wittgenstein tells us that “at the end of
reasons comes persuasion. (Think of what happens when
missionaries convert natives.)” (1969, §612; cf.
§92)

Probably
the
most popular view
among current philosophers is that human beings can only modify their
frameworks gradually and that some parts may be utterly immune to
revision at any given time. Such claims are often accompanied by an
invocation of Neurath's
simile[2]
of rebuilding a ship at sea: we can change
the ship bit-by-bit, relying on the unchanging parts for stability as
we proceed, but we cannot rebuild the entire ship all at once.

Similarly, gradual and piecemeal changes in our conceptual framework
are possible, but we cannot change large chunks of it all at once,
since we would have no concepts or principles to use in working out the
transition. For example, we would have no standards to judge whether
two proposed modifications were consistent with one another.

In the 1960s many historians and philosophers of science reacted
against what they saw as the insufficiently historical and overly
formalistic approach of the dominant philosophy of science of their
day. The key insurrectionists were Norwood Russell Hanson (1958),
Stephen Toulmin (e.g., 1972), Paul Feyerabend (e.g., 1975/1993), and,
above all Thomas Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1970b, first edition 1962) has sold over a million
copies. None of these writers, save Feyerabend in some of his varied
moods, viewed themselves as relativists, but many of their
views – especially their claims about the
theory-ladenness
of perception,
incommensurability,
and the impossibility
of determining how well
a theory fits reality – suggested relativistic conclusions to many of
their readers.

A person's scientific outlook rarely saturates her life to the
extent that her native culture and language do, and so the relativistic
themes that emerged in their writings were more local and limited than
those suggested by linguistic or cultural relativists. The arguments of
the new philosophers of science were often more careful and detailed
than many previous arguments for relativistic conclusions, and their
examples, episodes from the history of science, could be evaluated
without having to go to another culture or (often) without having to
master an exotic language.

Much of this work, typically without the more relativistic
overtones, has been absorbed into mainstream philosophy of science.
Relativistic themes continue to surface, however, in the so-called
"strong programme" in the sociology of science and in the new fields of
science studies and related areas like cultural studies.

The great French pioneer of sociology, Émile Durkheim,
(1858-1917) argued (not terribly convincingly) for the formative power
of religion in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
(1912/1995). He held that a great deal of our cognitive and social life
is strongly influenced by religion and that concepts as fundamental as
genus and species, and even logic itself, have their source in
religious thoughts and practices. Durkheim himself thought that human
religions were similar enough that these concepts would be the same
across cultures, but if we combine his account with a more relativistic
picture of actual cultures and religions, we would get a sort of
relativism.

And the great German pioneer of sociology, Max Weber (1864-1920),
argued that various features of protestantism had led to the an
“iron cage” of instrumental rationality. This involves the
“disenchantment” of the earlier world, with all its rules,
regulations, and the whole dreary apparatus of quantification and
everything-by-the-book bureaucracies.

The influence of religion on modes of thought will seem more
plausible when we consider cultures where religion plays a more
pervasive role than it does in many cultures and sub-cultures in the
West. In more traditional cultures there is often no separation of
church and state, a priest or shaman may be the ultimate authority on
virtually everything, and morality, law, and religion are thoroughly
entwined. If the religion is animistic, all of nature may seem alive
and capable of causing harm. In such settings, the impact of religion
on modes of experience and thought could be quite powerful.

In many societies members of some ethnic groups, genders, or social
classes are treated differently than members of other ethnic groups,
genders, and classes. They are thus situated differently, and it is
sometimes argued that this can lead to important differences in modes
of thought and patterns of evaluation. Furthermore, the argument
continues, those in power may, consciously or unconsciously, downplay
or suppress the modes and patterns of those who are not, and having
ones viewpoints recognized can often be a step toward achieving
empowerment and equality.

Marx's account of ideology is one of the earliest views of
this sort, but this theme has been developed in various ways in later
thinkers. In some cases, e.g., Michel Foucault (1980), these ideas are
linked quite intimately to themes of domination and power. A good
discussion of many of the relevant issues can be found in the entry
on
feminist epistemology and philosophy of science.

Virtually all versions of relativism that have been defended in any
detail treat it as a social phenomenon. We can, however, allow for a
subjective version of relativism as limiting case in which each person
has her own concepts, epistemic standards, moral principles, or the
like. For example, the view that Plato attributes in his dialogue the
Theaetetus to the Ancient Greek Sophist Protagoras relativizes
truth to the individual.

It is possible that various combinations of independent variables
(e.g., language and religion) would lead to interesting outcomes,
reinforcing one another, neutralizing one another, or interacting in
complex and unexpected ways. It is also possible that some of the
variables lead to relativistic effects only under certain conditions;
this is, after all, how causes typically work.

Everyone is a member of many different groups-- tribes, linguistic
communities, subcultures, social classes, religious groups, political
parties, clans, families--with a variety of perspectives and
allegiances. Which groups matter for relativism? The answer is that
different species of relativism single out different groups as
relevant. The claim that a certain sort of group (e.g., culture,
linguistic community) is important for relativism, whereas other sorts
of groups (e.g., soccer teams, bridge clubs) are not, is a substantive,
descriptive, relativistic thesis that must be defended, or refuted, by
empirical evidence.

Different philosophers use different terms for their versions of the
more generic notion of a conceptual framework employed here. Terms that
have been used in related ways include worldview
(Weltanschauung) and categorial scheme. There are
also similarities to Wittgenstein's forms of life, various
phenomenologists' notions of the life world
(Lebenswelt), R. G. Collingwood's sets of absolute
presuppositions of a given culture and time, Thomas Kuhn's
paradigms, Michel Foucault's epistemes, and Nelson
Goodman's world versions. Some of these, e.g., a culture's
entire form of life, are quite global, influencing almost all aspects
of cognition. Others e.g., paradigms and many world versions, are
typically more local; for example, the first involves just a particular
style of science during a particular period, and second might involve
something as local as a given style of painting.

It would illuminate the general notion of a framework if we were
clearer about our own. Just what does it involve? And who are
we? In large, heterogeneous, multicultural societies with many
subcultures, talk of things like “our morality” involves
considerable oversimplification (and often a bit of ethnocentric
projection as well). Muslims, evangelical Christians, the Amish,
secular humanists, and disaffected teenagers in the inner city
doubtless share some moral outlooks, and if we describe their views at
a sufficiently abstract level they may look similar. But down at ground
level, in the shadows and fog where human action and feeling actually
take place, abstract principles at best tell part of the story. At this
more elemental level the moral outlooks of such groups differ in ways
that can matter a lot. At this level you don't have to go halfway
around the world to find moral alternatives; if you live in a large
city, you don't even have to go half way across town.

Something similar may be true, though perhaps to a lesser extent, of
other relativistic dependent variables like rationality or evidential
standards. For example, many members of modern Western societies
believe in the existence of a supernatural being and view (what they
take to be) its pronouncements as having strong epistemic force, others
are more skeptical, and some simply dismiss such beliefs as
superstitions.

Furthermore, even if we confine attention to relatively small and
homogeneous groups, it is often difficult to say with any precision
just what their concepts and evaluative standards amount to. Indeed,
philosophers who have spent decades trying to say what
“our” standards of rationality involve, what logic (if any)
we use, or what such central concepts as causation, person, or
justification boil down to are nowhere near a consensus. In fact, the
general project of conceptual analysis that was supposed to answer some
of these questions is now widely regarded as a failure.

Given the lack of clarity about our own case, caution is recommended
when we hear astonishing claims about the Hopi conception of time, the
Trobriand conception of causation, or the other exotic concepts or
values or beliefs so often attributed to other groups in discussions of
relativism.

On
the simplest picture, sets
of central beliefs and standards serve as principles that individuate
frameworks. We might call this pyramid relativism. It may be
tempting to view such principles as akin to the basic beliefs in
foundationalist theories of knowledge. This would not be completely
wrong, but it may suggest a model of central beliefs as axioms that are
used to justify further claims, where these on construed on the model
of theorems, whereas the role of central beliefs is more to provide a
structure within which experience and thought can occur. We will
encounter this view briefly below.

But a rather different picture of the structure of frameworks is
also possible, one in which the notion of centrality is a matter of
degree and in which no single set of beliefs or principles serves to
individuate a framework. This picture fits naturally with a more
coherentist conception of justification in which each belief may
receive support from others. We might call this raft
relativism, since (as suggested by
Neurath's boat)
there are no essential framework principles and all beliefs
can receive support from other beliefs, although some may be much more
central than others.

Pyramid relativism suggests that our concepts, beliefs, and
standards are more precise and well defined than they actually seem to
be. Such accounts also fit most naturally with a foundationalist
picture of justification, and this picture doesn't accurately depict
many of our actual epistemic practices. Furthermore, features like
centrality and depth come in degrees, and we would be hard pressed to
name the foundational principles of our own framework. Raft relativism
can accommodate these facts more easily than pyramid relativism
can.

Raft
frameworks
are more difficult to
individuate than pyramid frameworks, but this is not clearly a
drawback, since there is no reason to think that there is always a
clear fact of the matter as to whether two groups have the same
culture, language or, more generally, framework. Often it is more
enlightening to simply note the most salient similarities and
differences between groups, without worrying about thresholds or sharp
yes-or-no
answers.[3]

The various types of relativism are often assumed rather than argued
for, and when they are defended the arguments on their behalf vary
greatly in quality. We have touched on several arguments for various
species of relativism above; in this section we consider the most
common arguments in more detail.

We discussed perceptual relativism earlier, so here we only need to
recall how arguments for it typically proceed. The basic claim is that
perception is not, contrary to what have supposed, a neutral
physiological process that leads all normal human beings to perceive
the same thing in the same way when they gaze in the same direction.
Instead what we see (hear, feel, etc.) in any particular situation is
partially determined by the concepts, beliefs, and expectations we
bring to the situation.

Claims about top-down processing and theory-ladenness are descriptive
claims about the human perceptual system, and by themselves do not
entail any normative conclusions. But, various writers add, the
way that observations are colored by our beliefs and
expectations makes it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to adjudicate
between competing scientific theories or paradigms, forms of life, or
the like.

Many philosophers of science had believed that a theory-neutral
observation language existed which could be used to frame
theory-neutral descriptions of scientific observations. Others spoke of
a given, non-conceptual, element in experience. If such claims were
correct, then theory-neutral observations, a sort of perceptual
Archimedean point, could be used to adjudicate competing claims in a
way that would not beg the question in favor of one party and to the
detriment of the other.

Such arguments were given a prominent role by philosophers of
science like Norwood Russell Hanson (1958), Thomas Kuhn (1962), and
Paul Feyerabend (1975/1993), who argue that scientific observation is
theory-laden. Their claims were important because many philosophers of
science had supposed that there is a observation language that could be
used to describe experience in a neutral way, independent of any
theories. The existence of such a language would weaken many
relativistic claims, since it would provide a neutral, non-question begging
perspective from which we adjudicate the claims of competing
conceptions of the world. And many
other writers,
from anthropologists to art
historians, make related points, urging that perception is influenced
by various aspects of language or culture.

For example, in a much-cited thought experiment, Hanson (1958, Ch.
1) asks us to imagine Tycho Brahe (an advocate of a geocentric picture
of the solar system) and Johannes Kepler (an advocate of a heliocentric
view) as they gaze to the east at sunrise. Although they do see the
same object, the sun, Hanson tells us they see it very differently.
Tycho sees the sun rising, whereas Kepler sees the horizon dipping or
falling away from the fixed and immobile sun. Hence there is no neutral
observational framework that allows them to determine who is
correct.

Such claims are sometimes used (often in conjunction with other
premises) to support various species of normative relativism,
especially normative epistemological relativism, by noting the
fundamental role of observation in forming and justifying our beliefs.
At the very least, such arguments would eliminate simple pictures of
justification as based in perception which would, if correct, be a
serious obstacle to relativism (responses to such arguments are
discussed below in
5.2).

In our discussion of incommensurability and semantic holism
incommensurability and semantic holism
we noted the
view that the meanings of a person's words and sentences (or the
contents of her concepts and beliefs) are determined by the overall
role the words or concepts play in her culture, scientific framework,
linguistic community, or the like. So, the argument continues, if two
frameworks are substantially different from one another, the
concepts and linguistic meanings of one will not line up well
enough with those of the other for the members of the
respective groups to even discuss the same things. For example, we may
be told, earlier concepts of mass, or rights, even
logical concepts
can differ so much from ours that we cannot accurately
interpret their users as having any phrases or concepts that are
genuine counterparts of our words or concepts or, indeed, as having any
beliefs about mass or about rights or logical consequence.

Such arguments turn on claims about the meanings of words and
concepts, but they are sometimes buttressed by claims about perception.
For example, Feyerabend (1975/1993, p. 166) tells us that “[g]iven
appropriate stimuli, but different systems of classification (different
‘mental sets’), our perceptual apparatus may produce
perceptual objects which cannot be easily compared.”

If incommensurability arguments are sound, they support
weak normative truth-value relativism,
because they tell us that if the two groups' concepts and beliefs
differ in fundamental ways, the subject matters they can discuss are so
different that they cannot be compared (responses to such arguments are
discussed in
§5.4).

Different
responses
are
appropriate to different versions of relativism. Although there are a
few a priori, philosophical arguments designed to show that
certain sorts of cognitive or evaluative differences are in fact
impossible, most species of descriptive relativism are empirical claims
that must be supported, or discredited, with empirical evidence. Most
species of normative relativism, by contrast, require a more purely
philosophical response. The most damning objection to the more dramatic
forms of normative relativism (like truth-value relativism) is that
they are self-refuting, but other objections have been leveled against
various versions of relativism, and in this section we consider some of
the more compelling ones.

The first four responses on the list below are targeted primarily at
various forms of descriptive relativism; the remaining responses are
targeted primarily at various forms of normative relativism, although
empirical considerations enter here and there.

If there are no concepts or beliefs, then groups cannot differ with
respect to their concepts or beliefs and descriptive claims about the
relativity of concepts or beliefs cannot get off the ground. In such
cases it also makes little sense to ask normative questions about whether
some concepts or beliefs are better or more correct than others.

Although he popularized phrases like ‘ontological
relativity’, we saw
above
that
Quine opposes relativism with respect to concepts, beliefs, and meanings
precisely because he holds that there are no facts of the matter about
such things. Much of Quine's skepticism about minds and meanings and
mental representations is based on non-discredited behaviorist
assumptions, but there are more current anti-realist views about the
mind that would also nip many versions of relativism in the bud. The
best-known example is eliminative materialism, the view that our
everyday talk of concepts and beliefs and intentions is part of a
defective theory that should disappear as science progresses. But the
thoroughgoing anti-realism about concepts, beliefs, and other
representations required to discredit most versions of relativism is
very counterintuitive, and few philosophers find the existing arguments
for such views very compelling.

Descriptive perceptual relativism
is an empirical claim about human beings, and a
common response to it is that although human perception is somewhat
theory-laden,
it
is not as theory-laden as more extreme relativists often maintain.
Furthermore, the reply continues, to the extent that descriptive
perceptual relativism has been used to support various types of
normative relativism, the limits of theory-ladenness weakens the case
for them.

Controversy persists among vision scientists over the
extent
to
which our concepts and beliefs and expectations influence the content
of our perceptions, but the cumulative force of a large number of
examples and experiments
leaves little doubt that they sometimes play an
important role. Still, there are limits; we cannot, on pain of
hallucination, see just anything we hope or expect or are primed to
see. Once again, the question is whether there is room between two
extremes for an interesting version of relativism.

As noted above, various philosophers have argued that perception is
theory-laden in a way that can make it difficult, perhaps even
impossible, to use our observations to adjudicate between competing
frameworks. For example, in a much-cited thought experiment, Hanson
(1958, Ch. 1) asks us to imagine Tycho Brahe (an advocate of a
geocentric picture of the solar system) and Johannes Kepler (an
advocate of a heliocentric view) as they gaze to the east at
sunrise. Although they do see the same object, the sun, Hanson tells
us they see it very differently. Tycho sees the sun rising, whereas
Kepler sees the horizon dipping or falling away from the fixed and
immobile sun.

But Hanson's claims far outrun any historical evidence. Many people
today think of the earth as moving and the sun as standing still, but
almost four centuries after Kepler's work we still speak of the sun
rising and setting, and it looks and feels that way to many of us even
now. More importantly, by Kepler's time all responsible parties to this
debate knew that things would look exactly the same to observers on the
surface of the Earth, whether Tycho or Kepler (or Ptolemy or, we may
now add, Einstein) was right about the layout of the cosmos.

It is also an empirical question just how much (if at all) the
mechanisms involved in
top-down perceptual processing
lead members of
different cultures to perceive the things differently. As with all
cross-cultural work, especially with cultures that are very different
from our own, experiments here are vulnerable to many mishaps, and so
it is not surprising that much remains uncertain. Current evidence does
suggest that culture and language can influence perception; for
example, there is evidence that people tend to perceive things in ways
that are influenced by the manner in which they have learned to think
in order to function efficiently in their ecological setting. But large
influences of culture or language or beliefs on perception have yet to
be documented (see Section 3 of the supplementary document
Relativism and the Constructive Aspects of Perception
for more detail).

A neutral, pure sense-datum language is indeed a myth, but most
evidence suggests that the familiar world of physical objects is
usually neutral enough to allow for tests of scientific theories and at
least passable communication across cultural divides. Such empirical
claims, which of course may require revision as new evidence is found,
only bear on descriptive perceptual relativism in the case of human
beings. They leave open the possibility that other intelligent
creatures--particularly those with quite different sensory modalities
like echolocation or delicate sensitivity to magnetic fields--might
perceive the world in quite different ways. They also leave open many
of the issues involving
normative perceptual relativism.

To the extent that predispositions to use certain central concepts
(e.g., physical object, person, causation), hold certain central
beliefs (e.g., at least some events have causes, human beings have
intentions), or employ certain inference patterns (e.g., induction by
enumeration) are
innate,
it tells against
descriptive relativism with respect to those concepts, beliefs, or
styles of reasoning. It is an empirical matter whether human infants
come into the world with such predispositions, but there is emerging
evidence that they do and, indeed, that there are at least some
important linguistic, cognitive, and cultural universals.

The evidence comes from several fields.

Linguistics
Noam Chomsky's emphasis on innate
linguistic universals
led to a picture of deep commonality beneath surface
differences in natural languages. Linguistics is particularly
important, because universals were first defended here, and many
languages have now been carefully studied from this point of view.

Developmental Psychology
In the last two or three decades developmental psychologists have
devised several ingenious techniques for studying the perceptions and
concepts of infants, and there is growing evidence that human neonates
arrive in the world with strong propensities to perceive and think in
certain ways. For example, they are strongly predisposed to think of
the world in terms of physical objects that behave in predictable ways
(e.g., their paths of motion are continuous, they do not disappear when
people quit looking at them), persons with intension, and so on (e.g.,
Xu and Carey, 1996; Spelke and Newport, 1998; Chiang and Wynn,
2000).

AnthropologySome
workers in cognitive
anthropology and cross-cultural psychology have argued for the
existence of rather intricate cultural or human universals. Frequent
candidates, often said to be found in all known cultures (though not
necessarily in all individuals), include the use of tools, the
differentiation of sex roles, having myths and legends, music and
dance, and common facial expressions of certain emotions (e.g., smiling
when happy). To the extent that there is a fairly rich and detailed set
of human universals, a common core of human nature, it places important
limits on descriptive relativism with respect to human
beings.[4]

Claims about human universals bear most directly on descriptive
relativism, and then only with respect to humans, but they can also
arise in discussions of normative issues. One popular idea is that
evolution weeded out genotypes that built people who got things badly
wrong; the process favored a cognitive architecture that implements
normatively sound modes of perceiving and reasoning. Hence, the mere
fact that certain concepts or beliefs survived in our species is reason
to think that they are pretty close to being right. Thus the
psychologist Donald Campbell speaks of natural selection as
“validating the categories” (1974, p. 444).

Such claims have their critics. Some of the criticism is based on
general critiques of certain kinds of adaptationist reasoning (e.g.,
Gould and Lewontin, 1979), but even many thinkers who do not object to
adaptationism in principle have doubts about such claims. Thus, it is
often pointed out that evolution rarely has an opportunity to design
the best. It can only work with organisms as they already are, and
kludges that are prone to certain kinds of errors may have been the
best it could do under the circumstances. Furthermore, evolution might
be willing to trade a propensity to certain kinds of error for other
adaptations, e.g., for perceptual or conceptual mechanisms that are
fast and automatic. It would probably be more adaptive to classify some
nonpredators as predators, for example, than to take more time getting
things right, since greater accuracy here might be purchased at the
cost of an increased likelihood of being eaten.

Debate over these issues often has an all-or-nothing flavor, but
more nuanced approaches are possible. In his program for the rational
analysis of human cognition, the psychologist John R. Anderson (e.g.,
1990) has made a detailed attempt to explain various aspects of human
cognition on the assumption that they are well adapted to the
environment, i.e., that they are optimized with respect to specific
criteria of adaptive importance. And in a series of highly original
papers, the cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard (e.g., 1994) has
explored ways in which various perceptual and cognitive universals may
be adaptive reflections of certain very general features of the world
around us.

On a more philosophical note, Christopher Stephens (2001) has argued
that under some conditions having reliable belief-forming mechanisms
might confer a selective advantage, while under other conditions it
might not, and he has developed a decision-theoretic model that tells
us which to expect when. Of course, it is always important to bear in
mind that evolution involves more forces than just natural selection,
and it is possible that countervailing, non-selective evolutionary
forces (e.g., genetic drift, migration) would swamp the effects of
selection even in cases where it favored having true beliefs or using
extremely reliable patterns of inference.

Reference or denotation is an especially important
species of meaning. It is standardly viewed as a relation between
linguistic expressions, on the one hand, and things and properties in
the world, on the other. The thing or property that a linguistic
expression (or, on more mentalistic accounts, concept) refers to is
called its referent or denotation.

Reference
is
sometimes thought to provide a way to break out of a group's language
and concepts and beliefs. Several early opponents of incommensurability
theses in the philosophy of science argued that just as two witnesses
in a courtroom could have different beliefs about a single person--the
defendant--while still referring to her, two scientists could
have rather different beliefs about mass or genes without the
denotation of ‘mass’ or ‘gene’ changing at all.
Moreover, some philosophers have argued, even in cases where
terminology may change, scientists may use words that apply to one and
the same physical magnitude; for example, Earman and Fine (1977) argue
that Newton's word ‘mass’ has the same meaning as our
phrase ‘proper mass’.

Similarly, it may be argued, members of two cultures may have words
or phrases that refer to the same kinds of things (e.g., rabbits) or to
the same specific thing (e.g., that rabbit by the elm tree). And when
this is so, the denotations of their words provide a common denominator
that allows different groups to break out of their frameworks and to
talk to each other about a common, objective world.

Partisans of incommensurability often responded by claiming that the
denotation of a linguistic expression, and not just its meaning in some
more amorphous sense, is determined by its place in an overall theory
or web of beliefs. Such claims rely on what philosophers of language
call
descriptivist theories of reference,
according to which a word's denotation
is determined by the descriptions or the contents of the beliefs that
constitute the word's meaning, intension, or sense. Descriptivist
theories have come under withering attack from partisans of direct
theories of reference, who argue that words and concepts are attached
more directly to their denotations, without the mediation of a cluster
of descriptions. Hence, it may be prudent for the semantic relativist
to grant that reference is more like the advocates of direct theories
contend, but to hold that it refers to things in a world relativized to
a framework (this is an instance of the
second strategy
below).

There is a more general picture about the meanings of words and
(with minor adaptations) concepts that has a similar anti-relativistic
flavor. About twenty-five years ago the American philosophy Hilary
Putnam presented a thought experiments in which we were invited to
imagine twin-earth, a planet as much like earth as possible except that
every place there is water on earth the counterpart of that place on
twin-earth has a liquid that seems very much like water, but which in
fact has some complicated chemical makeup, call it XYZ.

Putnam argues that the word ‘water’ has a different
meaning when used by citizens of twin-earth than it does here on earth
and that the external, chemical composition of the liquid affects the
word's meaning. The moral we are encouraged to draw from this, and
related examples developed by Tyler Burge and others, is that
meanings just are not in the head. At least not completely.
Many philosophers found these examples intuitively compelling, and so
they accepted one or another version of semantic externalism,
according to which the meanings of many words (or the contents of many
concepts and thoughts) are at least partially individuated by
environmental and social factors (like the chemical structure of
XYZ).

If such views are right, it seems natural to conclude that the
meanings of words and the contents of concepts and thoughts often
involve features (like the molecular constitution of a liquid) of
an objective, mind-independent, non-relativistic world that play a
vital role in determining the meanings of our words and the contents of
our thoughts.

The issues here are complex, and we will just note two responses the
relativist might make. First, although these thought experiments
provide good support for their suggested conclusions, it is not
conclusive, and the relativist could simply reject Putnam's intuitions
about the roles of various external factors in determining linguistic
meanings.

Second,
the relativist
could opt for a
relativistic reconstrual,
arguing that the meanings of many of our words and concepts do
involve external factors, but that these are in turn shaped by, or
relativized to, frameworks. On most accounts frameworks are shared,
social things whose details are not always transparent to their users.
So, the relativist might argue, once we adopt a framework in which
things can be individuated in terms of chemical structure, there could
be facts about chemical structure that we have yet to discover, and
these could affect the meanings of our words and concepts. In short,
the relativist can argue for a world-relative externalism.

Platonism is a family of views that get their name because
they involve entities--propositions, properties, sets--which, like
Plato's Forms, are held to be abstract, immutable things that exist
outside space and time. On many platonistic approaches, concepts
express abstract properties and beliefs are relations between people
and abstract propositions. This suggests a way around some types of
relativism, since people in quite different cultures could have many of
the same beliefs (because they could believe the same abstract
propositions), and a belief would be true just in case the immutable
proposition it expresses is true.

The relativist may reply that platonistic accounts lead to severe
difficulties in epistemology and semantics. The problem is that we are
physical organisms living in a spatio-temporal world, and we cannot
interact causally (or in any other discernible way) with abstract,
causally inert things. Moreover, few people are aware of having any
special cognitive faculty that puts them in touch with a timeless realm
of abstract objects, neuroscientists have never found any part of the
brain that subserves such an ability, such a view is not suggested by
what is known about the ways children acquire concepts and beliefs, and
nothing in physics suggests any way in which a physical system (the
brain) can make any sort of contact with causally inert, non-physical
objects. Moreover, if our minds cannot make epistemic contact with such
things, it is difficult to see how our words and linguistic practices
can make semantic contact with them.

None of this proves that abstract propositions don't exist, but it
shows it isn't obvious that they do. There have been few debates
between relativists and platonists over such matters, however, perhaps
because the two views lie so far apart that their proponents cannot
easily engage one another.

A
common
line of argument for several
species of relativism, including truth-value relativism and reality
relativism, turns on what we might call the mediation problem.
This argument takes various forms, but the fundamental idea is that we
are trapped in our concepts or beliefs or epistemic standards or, more
generally, trapped in our frameworks in a way that precludes our
checking to see if they match reality. And once we add that alternative
frameworks of concepts, beliefs, or standards are possible, the
relativist urges, we are well on our way to relativism. One especially
common version of this argument focuses on concepts. We cannot think
without concepts (or talk without words), and so we cannot get outside
our concepts (and words) to assess their fidelity to the world as it
really is, independent of language and thought.

Such arguments encourage the picture of concepts as intermediaries
that stand between us and the world “out there.”
The model of mediation at work here is similar to representative
realism, a position once commonly attributed to John Locke (1632-1704),
in which ideas are always interposed between our experience
and cognition, on the one hand, and the outside world, on the other. On
this model there is indeed a problem of knowing whether our thoughts
and ideas accurately represent external reality, and it is no accident
that such views tend toward skepticism. I am trapped behind the veil of
my ideas, and so I can never discover, even in principle, whether my
ideas of dogs or chairs correspond to anything out there in the
world.

But, the anti-relativist may respond, representational realism is
the wrong model for conceptual mediation. In ordinary circumstances my
concept of a dog allows me to individuate and reidentify dogs, to
recognize and reason about them, but it does not stand between me and
Rover. Under normal conditions I can just look and see that there is a
dog in front of me.

To be sure, different frameworks of concepts are possible, at least
to some degree, and of course we cannot talk without language or think
without concepts. But, this response continues, once we have a
battery of concepts, truth often is completely clear and perfectly
objective. If we don't accept the view that there is just One True
Story of the world told in terms of The One Right Lexicon of Concepts,
we do not need to check to see if our concepts are the right
ones. Rather, we need to check to see whether our beliefs or
sentences (framed in terms of our concepts or words)
are true. And it is not necessary to go to a “neutral
cosmic exile,” or to find an “Archimedean point”
outside all language and thought, in order to do this. It is something
we do all the time, right from where we are; once I have the concept of
a dog, it is often obviously and unproblematically true that there is a
dog in the corner.

As always, relativists have various rejoinders, e.g., that when we
factor in the framework-relativity of central beliefs and epistemic
standards, we may be trapped in our frameworks in more sinister ways.
But there is no quick and simple argument from the necessity of some
concepts (or other) for experience and thought, even together with the
possibility (at least up to a point) of different frameworks of
concepts, to the conclusion that we are ineluctably trapped in a way
that leads to any of the more insidious versions of relativism.

Relativistic conclusions are sometimes based on claims about the
exotic beliefs and practices of distant cultures or on
thought-experiments in which we are encouraged to imagine (putative)
dramatic alternatives to our own modes of evaluation and thought. But
the fact that we can coherently imagine beliefs and standards and
practices that differ in small ways from our own does not mean that we
can coherently imagine ones that differ in massive ways. Efforts to
extrapolate from genuine, but modest, differences to vast differences
may simply lead to incoherence.

We can, for example, imagine people who reject the law of
excluded middle
and
people who do not, and we can probably imagine one group using
intuitionistic logic where another uses
classical logic.
But we cannot easily make sense of the idea of a group that
regards
conjunction introduction and elimination
as
blatantly fallacious. And if attempts at dramatic extrapolation beyond
our familiar modes of thought fail to reveal real possibilities, they
do not support relativism after all.

To doubt, to raise questions, to offer justification, to engage in
any sort of rational activity requires the possession of some
concepts and beliefs and epistemic standards that we use to perform the
activity. Perhaps we can replace many, or most, or (some tell us) even
all of our beliefs and epistemic standards, provided that we modify
them bit-by-bit over a long stretch of time. But we cannot make drastic
revisions in our entire corpus of beliefs and standards all at once.
This would be like dismantling Neurath's ship all at once while at sea
(see footnote 2); among other things, it would leave us without any
standards to judge whether two proposed modifications were consistent
with one another, whether one provided evidence for another, whether
one explained another.

Trying to understand vastly different norms and practices requires
us to do something similar in imagination. To get a genuine feel for
what it would be like to think in a vastly different way
requires us to bracket more and more of our own cognitive resources, to
jettison our very standards of understanding and intelligibility, and
this leaves us bereft of resources for understanding anything at all. For
example, a vital core of our reasoning involves the use of logical
principles like modus ponens and conjunction elimination. These are
very nearly constitutive of our ability to think, and attempts to
imagine our way into forms of reasoning that constantly flout these
principles leave us dumbfounded, rather than with an enriched sense of
the possibilities. Such projects ask us to make sense of alternatives
that require us to abandon our resources for making sense of anything
whatsoever.

Partisans of more local versions of relativism may concede the
point, urging that it leaves open the possibility that more limited
thought experiments may be more successful. For example, trying to
imagine a morality rather different from our own needn't deprive us of
logic or some of our other standards of rationality, so the project is
not obviously self-subverting.

When it comes to more global versions of relativism the more extreme
relativist may reply that our inability to make sense of various
alternatives now does little to show they are impossible or incoherent,
because what we can make sense of or imagine is itself historically and
culturally (and doubtless biologically) conditioned. The limits to
conceivability depend partly on our current concepts, beliefs, and
epistemic standards. Before the nineteenth century most people believed
non-Euclidean geometries to be impossible, even incoherent, but this is
no longer true.

In some cases we can make sense of modes of thought and
reasoning that are somewhat different from our own, but it is often
easy to overestimate just how different they are. For example, even
professional philosophers, economists, and mathematicians in our own
culture champion somewhat different normative models that sometimes
offer conflicting advice. Thus we find alternative logics (classical
logic, intuitionistic logic, and many others), probability theories
(e.g., the classical theory, Shafer's belief functions), schools of
statistics (e.g., Fisher's, Neyman and Pearson's, the ill-motivated
blend of the two often taught today), and decision theories (e.g.,
evidential decision theories, various causal decision theories, regret
theory). And if the experts can't agree about which model is best, the
relativist may ask, how can we expect to find any solid ground in the
area?

But competing normative models they needn't be viewed as package
deals to be accepted in all-or-none fashion. Usually some aspects of a
model will be more compelling and defensible than others, and when it
comes to this more solid core, many of the competing models agree. For
example, classical and intuitionist logic disagree about whether the
law of excluded middle is valid, but there is no logical system (with
any adherents) in which modus ponens is invalid. Similarly,
although there are alternative normative models of probability, none of
them permits a conjunction to be more probable than either of its
conjuncts.

Even when there is no uniquely correct answer to a problem, it
doesn't follow that every possible answer is equally good. This is
reflected in the fact that when competing models do not agree on a
precise answer, they often agree that the answer falls within a certain
range. We may overlook the large measure of overlap because it is so
obvious it goes without saying, while the areas of difference seem much
more interesting.

Where we can go next depends on where we are now. The bare, abstract
possibility of an alternative mode of evaluation or thought does not
mean that it is a live option for us, here and now. Indeed,
even if we can make sense of an alternative and would like to adopt it,
it doesn't follow that we can. There are several reasons why this is
so.

For one thing, as Bernard Williams (1986) notes, cultures provide
contexts that make certain ways of life possible and others impossible.
The social and cultural structure no longer exist anywhere today that
would enable someone to live the life or think the thoughts of a Greek
Bronze Age chief or a medieval samurai. Or, to take a rather different
sort of case, some cognitive and evaluative options are probably too
complex for human beings to even grasp; among other things, the rather
severe limitations on human working memory and the fact that our
neurons react rather slowly place some kinds of concepts and reasoning
beyond our reach. You can't get there from here.

The fact that we cannot currently understand certain (putative)
alternatives is sometimes taken to show that they are not really
possible at all, but such arguments turn on a verificationism and
anthropomorphism that are as implausible here as anywhere else.
Arguments concerning conceivability and cognitive options are often
inconclusive, however, partly because the limits to the humanly or
biologically possible are difficult enough to chart, and the margins of
absolute coherence or possibility are even more uncertain.

When something isn't a live option for us we do not face practical
worries about whether to adopt it, but it doesn't follow that learning
about it shouldn't affect how we think about things. Realizing that if
we had been born in a very different time and place many of the things
that now seem obvious and important to us would have seemed implausible
or trivial, while things that now seem implausible or trivial might
have seemed obvious and important, can reinforce our sense of the
contingency of our current forms of evaluation and thought. This in
turn can affect our normative views, because it can undermine our
confidence, in our more reflective moments, that the (apparent)
obviousiousness or inevitability of a principle or a belief ensures
that it is right or true.

Transcendental arguments are often characterized as
arguments designed to show that some obvious feature of experience or
knowledge presupposes our having certain concepts and beliefs. The most
famous transcendental arguments were developed by the German
philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in the Critique of Pure
Reason. His aim was to justify our use of the twelve central
concepts he called categories (e.g., causation, substance) and
our belief in certain principles (e.g., that every event has a cause),
which are framed in terms of the categories.

Kant's arguments are designed to do two things. First, they are
intended to show that all finite creatures who experience things as
being in space and time must think of the world in terms of
central concepts like object and property, causation, reality,
negation, possibility, and so on (although Kant doesn't always mean by
these exactly what we would mean now). Furthermore, such creatures must
regulate their thought by the principles associated with these concepts
(e.g., they must assume that every event is caused). In short, certain
concepts and beliefs are necessary or indispensable for experience and
knowledge.

Second, Kant's arguments are intended to show that we are
correct or justified in using these concepts and
holding these beliefs. Events really do have causes or, as Kant puts
it, the concept of causation has “objective validity.” Kant
saw these two aspects of his arguments as inseparable, but it will be
useful here to focus on them separately; we may call the first the
indispensability aspect and the second the justificatory
aspect.

Although Kant's one-time student (and one-time friend) Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and Kant's neighbor and friend Johann
Georg Hamann (1730-88) were busy sowing the seeds of relativism in
Königsberg, right in Kant's backyard, their claims would only
later find a following, and Kant himself was not much concerned with
such views. Still, if the indispensability aspects of Kant's arguments
were sound, there would be a common core of thought that is
indispensable, necessary, immune to revision, and invariant across all
creatures remotely like us. This would provide a purely philosophical,
a priori refutation of descriptive relativists' claims that
different groups do--or even that different groups might--lack concepts
like causation or get by without thinking that events have causes.

Furthermore, if the justificatory aspects of Kant's arguments were
sound, they would answer the normative relativist by showing that the
use of these concepts and principles is justified. Moreover, they would
justify our modes of thought from within, without any yearning
to escape to some mythical Archimedean point in a futile effort to
justify them from the outside.

Kant's arguments are subject to an enormous scholarly dispute, but
the basic claim is that finite creatures (like us) who experience
things as being in space and time cannot have even a rudimentary
self-consciousness or sense of a temporal history--cannot have
any coherent experience at all--unless they are aware of an objective
world. Dispensing with Kant's jargon, the general view is that coherent
temporal experience is possible only if it is experience of a world of
physical objects with determinate extensive and intensive properties,
each of which has a definite location in a single, unified (Euclidean)
space and a single unified time, and in which every event has a cause
and each object causally interacts with all of the rest.

All of this sounds a little too good to be true. The most immediate
difficulty is that many of the things Kant held to be necessarily true
no longer seem true at all. It is no longer possible to maintain that
it is necessarily true and knowable a priori that physical
space is Euclidean. Furthermore, the special theory of relativity tells
us that time is not unified in the strong sense that Kant supposed and
that not all objects can causally interact with each other. And on the
usual interpretations (most other than David Bohm's), quantum theory
tells us that determinism fails and that objects need not always have
determinate locations in space and time or determinate magnitudes (like
a particular momentum or energy or spin).

The justificatory aspects of Kant's arguments depend on his doctrine
of transcendental idealism, the claim that space and time and, hence,
spatio-temporal objects and occurrences, do not exist in the world as
it really is, independently of how we think about it. But Kant's
defense of this thesis is almost universally agreed to be unsound.
Indeed, the view that the world as it really is, independently of how
we know and experience it, is not spatial or even temporal is very
difficult to understand, much less believe.

Although few philosophers have endorsed all of the details of Kant's
philosophy, many later thinkers tried to adapt various aspects of his
approach to their own ends. We briefly note two general approaches
here. The first, like Kant's own work, would tell against many versions
of relativism. But when it comes to relativism Kantian themes are a
double-edged sword, and the second approach has, ironically, often been
used to support various relativistic theses.

In Individuals Sir Peter Strawson (1959) attempts to
salvage a scaled-down Kantianism that does not depend on transcendental
idealism. Strawson believes his arguments show both the
indispensability and justifiability of certain modes of thought,
roughly that we employ a framework of physical objects and persons that
exist in a single, unified space and time.

Barry Stroud (1968) makes a compelling case that without something
very much like transcendental idealism Strawson's arguments at best
show that certain modes of thought are inevitable for us. For example,
we may not be able to help believing in the existence of objects in an
external world, but it doesn't follow that this belief is correct. If
the indispensability aspects of Strawson's arguments worked they would
still show that various sorts of descriptive relativism are untenable,
but many philosophers now believe that although he shows that
certain ways of dispensing with concepts like those of
physical objects (as in his ingenious universe of sounds in ch. 2), he
fails to show that no ways of dispensing with them could work.
Hence, he doesn't even show these concepts to be indispensable.

Strawson tries to retain some of the indispensability aspects of
Kant's arguments while abandoning Kant's transcendental idealism. Other
philosophers tried the reverse, agreeing with Kant that the mind does
play an essential role in shaping the structure of experience and
knowledge (although few philosophers go so far as to hold that the mind
literally contributes all aspects of space and time), while abandoning
the indispensability aspects of Kant's work.

The
basic
idea here is to
endorse Kant's claim that a person's central concepts and beliefs play
a large role in structuring the world as they know it, but to argue
that rather different frameworks of concepts and beliefs can be used
for this task. Different historical periods or cultures may have rather
different central concepts and beliefs and standards, i.e., different
frameworks, and when they do, this will lead their members to construct
their worlds in rather different ways. Views of this sort, which still
have their proponents, were developed by thinkers as diverse as William
James (e.g., 1907, esp. Lecture 5), C. I. Lewis (1923, 1929), Hans
Reichenbach (1920), Ernst Cassirer (e.g., 1923), R. G. Collingwood
(e.g., 1940), Rudolf Carnap (e.g., 1950) and to some extent the
Wittgenstein of On Certainty (1969). In most cases the debt to
Kant was quite explicit, and one Kantian theme running through many of
these discussions is that a group's central principles and concepts
provide something like conditions for the possibility of knowledge; the
unKantian part is that the principles and concepts are not fixed and
immutable.[5]

It is a great irony that Kant, a supreme objectivist and champion of
the Enlightenment who would have been repelled by virtually any form of
relativism, introduced an idea that came to play a pivotal role in many
relativistic arguments, including arguments for
reality relativism,
the strongest version of relativism that there is.

A number of philosophers and social scientists, including W. V. O.
Quine (1960, ch. 2), Donald T. Campbell (1964), Martin Hollis (1967),
and Donald Davidson (e.g., 1974), have argued that we can only
understand or interpret others if they largely agree with us about what
is true, reasonable, justified or the like.

Davidson's
discussion
is the most detailed and the
most well-known. He argues that we must employ a
principle of charity
if we are to
interpret or understand the members of a newly-discovered alien culture
(or anyone else, for that matter). Without worrying about detailed
formulations for a moment, the principle counsels us to interpret
others in a way that makes as many of their beliefs true as we can.

The point is not merely philosophical. In a methodological
discussion of his cross-cultural work on visual illusions
(Segal, Campbell, and Herskovits,
1966), Campbell (1964) stresses the need for
comprehension checks.
He and his coworkers used
pictures of lines of various colors, lengths, and orientations, and it
was only after their informants correctly identified which of two lines
were longer, which more slanted, and so on that the experiment could
begin. Without such agreement, it would be impossible to go on to test
for susceptibility to illusions, because the results could not be
interpreted as showing that the subject was talking about the same
things that the experimenter was asking about. As Campbell puts it:

It turns out that the anthropologist's main cue for
achieved communication is similarity between the response of the other
to a stimulus and the response which he himself would make.
Disagreement turns out to be a sign of communication failure (1964, p.
37).

Although many writers agree that something like a principle of
charity is right, they disagree about the details. A recurring
criticism is that some kinds of agreement (e.g., agreement about
physical objects in the immediate environment) matter more than others
(e.g., agreement about the more subtle aspects of religion), so simply
aiming to maximize or optimize the degree to which others agree with us
is insufficiently discriminating. Still, in retrospect it appears that
many writers had the same general point in mind: in order to understand
others we must assume that many of their beliefs about most obvious
things (e.g., that there is a rabbit in front of them) are true or at
least sensible (by our lights), that they hold many beliefs that we
would hold if we were in their circumstances, and that they reason in
ways not too different from the ways that we reason.

But how could we possibly know, without actual empirical
investigation, that others will agree with much of what we think? Well,
the response goes, suppose that I point to a rabbit and my informant
says ‘Gavagai’. Unless I assume that she sees what I see,
takes me to be asking a question about it, and intends her answer to be
relevant and true, I have no reason to interpret any of her behavior
as evidence that ‘Gavagai’ means
‘Rabbit’. And if I can't get a line on her beliefs about
salient objects right there in front of us, how can I ever come to
understand her when we turn to more abstruse matters like ethics or
religion? Or consider a few of the agreements involved with Campbell's
comprehension checks: we require agreement about what lines are, which
figure the experimenter is pointing to, that the experimenter is asking
a question and hopes for an answer, and a host of other things that are
so obvious they are easily overlooked.

In short, the argument concludes, it is not that successful
translation and interpretation just often happen to disclose a good
measure of agreement. A good measure of agreement is a
precondition for successful translation and
interpretation.

If something like the principle of charity is right, it would place
rough limits on the amount of conceptual or epistemic diversity that
translation or interpretation could reveal. But the argument from
charity does not show that there couldn't be groups with concepts and
beliefs very different from our own, so different, perhaps, that we
couldn't even understand or express one another's views. The fact that
we cannot translate what we think might be a group's language or
understand what we think might be their mental life only tells against
the claims that they have a language and a mental life if some dubious
version of verificationism, according to which there could only be
conceptual differences if we could discover them, is right.

Davidson has also used the principle of charity
to defend
the normative thesis that any
creature capable of having beliefs at all must have mostly true
beliefs. But even if this is so, it leaves open the possibility of a
weak version
of a truth-value relativism in
which the sets of beliefs of two groups are so different that there is
very little overlap between them.

Finally, the principle of charity precludes the discovery of
dramatic and disquieting differences between groups only if we have
very exacting standards for what counts as dramatic or disquieting.
After all, vast differences--e.g., those between Hitler and Mother
Teresa--actually do exist. Indeed, at least many real differences,
genuine clashes, can only take place against the background of a
certain amount of agreement that allows for a shared subject matter; if
two groups are to disagree about whether most events have causes or
whether murder is wrong, they must share the concepts of an event and
causation, of murder and being wrong.

Truth is the Achilles' heel of relativism. According to the
normative thesis of
strong truth-value relativism
one and the same thing can be true relative to one
framework and false relative to another, true
for some groups and false for others, and ever since
Plato's argument against this form of relativism in the
Theaetetus many philosophers have agreed that the view is
self-contradictory or self-refuting. Plato's argument is sometimes
known as the
peritrope;
it's a
turning the tables, turning the relativist's line of reasoning back
against itself to show that his thesis succumbs to the very relativity
he defends. Relativists always face the occupational hazard of sawing
off the limb they are sitting on, but with strong truth-value
relativism they seem to cut down the whole tree.

The problem of self-refutation is quite general. It arises when
truth is relativized to a framework of concepts, beliefs, standards,
or practices. It also arises for many of the more sweeping claims that
central epistemic notions are somehow relative. If the epistemic
relativist argues that all justification or rationality is framework
relative, he lays himself open to the reply that his very claim is at
best justified relative to his framework, only rational by his own
standards, only defensible by his own guidelines, just as much a
social construction as he insists everything else is.

Plato's argument against strong truth-value relativism is typically
said to go like this: either the claim that truth is relative is true
absolutely (i.e., true in a non-relative sense) or else it is only true
relative to some framework. If it is true absolutely, all across the
board, then at least one truth is not merely true relative to a
framework, so this version of the claim is inconsistent. Furthermore,
if we make an exception for the relativist's thesis, it is difficult to
find a principled way to rule out other exceptions; what justifies
stopping here? On the other hand, if the relativist's claim that truth
is relative is only true relative to his framework, then it
can be false in other, perhaps equally good, frameworks. And why should
we care about that the relativist's (perhaps rather idiosyncratic or
parochial) framework?

Weak truth-value relativism escapes many of the dangers of
self-refutation, since it does not allow one and the same thing to be
true in one framework and false in another. But if normative
truth-value relativism is intended as a view that is true simpliciter,
it metastasizes very quickly. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that
truth is relative to a person's (or group's) conceptual
framework (for ease of exposition we consider individuals, but the
point generalizes easily). Then, the relativist tells us, the very same
belief (or sentence), call it p, can be true in Wilbur's
framework, W, but false in Sam's framework, S. But if
truth is relative in the strong sense, it can also be true in Wilbur's
framework W that p is true in W and false in
Sam's framework S that p is true in Wilbur's
framework W. There is not even any objective fact about what
is true in any given framework.

Worse is in store. There could be frameworks in which it is true
that Wilbur's current belief has the content that grass is green and
other frameworks in which his belief has the content that snow is
white. There could be frameworks in which it is true that Wilbur's
framework is W and other frameworks in which it is false that
Wilbur's framework is W, and so there is no objective fact
about what framework anyone has. Furthermore, it may be true in
Wilbur's framework that the frameworks W and S are
identical (W = S) but true in Sam's framework that W
and S are distinct (W ≠S). It may also be
true in Wilbur's framework that W itself is a framework and
true in Sam's that W is not a framework. It may be true in
Sam's framework that there are no frameworks, or that everything is
true in every framework, or that nothing is true in any. It may also be
true in some frameworks (e.g., ones without concepts of physical
objects or persons) that Wilbur and Sam do not exist.

In short, there is no fact about whether there are frameworks, about
what frameworks are, about what is true in any particular framework,
about what framework anyone has, about what anyone even thinks his own
framework is like, or about anything else. It is quicksand all the way
down. The metastasis is total. The meltdown is complete.

Champions of relative truth often find it tempting to suppose that
their thesis of strong truth-value relativism (perhaps along with a few
other things that go along with it) is true in some absolute sense. The
doctrine of relative truth is somehow exempt. But why go just
this far and no further? No one has ever given any argument
that would begin to support the case for such exemptions, and the
prospects are dim, because such a strategy is in considerable tension
with the general pictures that lead to strong truth-value relativism in
the first place.

The relativist might urge that frameworks in which truth is relative
are superior in some way to frameworks in which it is not, then urge
that this difference gives us a reason to accept his framework, and
with it the thesis of strong truth-value relativism. But the
relativist's framework cannot be superior by virtue of containing
the truth about relativism (or about anything else) since,
according to his view, all truth is relative. Nor is it clear how the
relativist's framework could be better justified than the
non-relativist's. Among other things, justified beliefs are ones that
track truth in some way, and if truth is relative, justification is
likely to turn out relative as well. Indeed, the arguments to support
the claim that truth is relative in the strong sense are very likely to
support the claim that justification is relative as well. The problem
is that no one has yet found any good reasons why the relativist's
framework should command our allegiance, while his opponent's framework
should not.

The relativist's best hope is to admit that he inhabits a framework
and can only speak from within it. He can even acknowledge that his
claims are only true relative to it. Still, it's his and his claim is
important in it.

It's us, not just me

This strategy will be more compelling if the relativist can convince
his interlocutors that their--seemingly objective--concepts
and beliefs in fact presuppose the same framework as the relativist's
and that the doctrine of relative truth is true in the framework they
all share. It's not just that his claim is true in his idiosyncratic
framework, but that it's true in the framework that we also inhabit. If
the relativist could make such a view plausible, he could then add that
his claims are no worse off than most of the other things we
hold to be true. In short, The realist's or objectivist's seemingly
objective concepts and beliefs presuppose the same framework as the
relativist's, and truth is relative in it. And if relativism's
claims are as secure as the myriad claims that are on solid ground for
us normally, what more can we say? Indeed, the relativist might even
attempt to expropriate one response to relativism and argue that
frameworks in which his thesis is false are not
live options
for us.

The project of showing the objectivist that her beliefs depend on a
common framework of concepts, standards, and beliefs and that
relativism is reasonable according to them would not be easy; in effect
it would involve the various sorts of arguments and counterarguments
that have surfaced throughout this entry. Furthermore, even if the
relativist succeeded, his view would still be at best relatively true.
Whether such a position is at all defensible is a matter of debate, but
at this juncture things have become more complicated than the simpler
versions of Plato's refutation might suggest.

The claim that truth is relative in the strong sense does indeed
subvert itself, but this doesn't mean that there couldn't be genuine
and interesting differences among groups that could quite reasonably be
called relativistic. What it does mean is that if these views are to be
developed in an interesting way, we must find a way to dissociate them
from the strong version of truth-value relativism.

It is difficult to deny some of the key premises relativists employ
in defending their views. We are historically and culturally
situated creatures who cannot step outside our concepts and standards
and beliefs to appraise their fit with some mind-independent reality of
“things-in-themselves.” Furthermore, although we can
justify many of our more central beliefs and epistemic standards in a
piecemeal way, we cannot justify all of them at once, and perhaps we
cannot justify some of them, like induction, at all.

The challenge is to do justice to such facts without ending up in
the quicksand of extreme relativism, and many writers now advise moving
“beyond relativism” (many books, chapters, and articles
bear this phrase in the title), counseling us to steer a course between
the Scylla of relativism, on the one side, and the Charybdis of an
over-simplified absolutism, on the other. Finding such a course is
easier said than done, however, and there is more agreement on the
desirability of such a project than on how to carry it out. Still,
various proposals recur in the literature.

Relativistic claims often sound better in the abstract than they do
when we get down to cases (a point that made an unusual appearance in
the public press in 1996 with the Sokal
hoax).[6]
When we turn to concrete
examples, extreme relativistic claims are often not at all true to
experience. No one really supposes that a postmodernist witness can
justify his testimony, come what may, that he saw Jones commit the
murder on the grounds that everything is a social construction and this
is just how he constructs things. Indeed, our belief that such
practices are unacceptable is much stronger than our beliefs in most of
the premises used in arguments for stronger versions of relativism.

Once a framework is up and running, there are many obvious facts
about what is right or wrong, probable or improbable, true or false.
Furthermore, coherent and workable frameworks cannot be created by
simple fiat. It took several millennia of extraordinary imagination and
labor on the parts of thousands and thousands of people to produce the
frameworks of modern science. It just isn't true that “anything
goes.”

Conceptual and epistemic changes do occur, and talk of being trapped
in our current beliefs and standards can be overstated. Children learn
radically new things, adults sometimes acquire jarringly new values and
beliefs, scientists occasionally embrace dramatically new theories.
Moreover, people often view things after the change as great
improvements over what went before (although this is tempered by the
fact that the new convert to Nazism or to mystical anti-rationalism may
feel a sense of improvement just as keenly as those who move in the
opposite directions).

Perhaps the most promising strategy for finding a middle way between
extreme relativism, on the one hand, and an over-simplified
objectivism, on the other, is to try to reconcile the contingent,
historical, culture-bound nature of our thought with what seems to be
our ability to come to think in better--and not simply
different--ways.

Thinkers who attempt this often begin by observing that we must
start from where we are, warts and all, with our current concepts and
beliefs and standards and limitations (we could, after all, scarcely
begin from anywhere else). Furthermore, they often continue, our
beliefs and standards do not require justification unless they are
challenged in some relevant way. This is not to say that we are forever
stuck with our current views, however, because various pressures can
lead us to make improvements. This possibility of improvement is often
overlooked, however, because we are in the grip of some
overly-ambitious model of rationality or justification that refuses to
count something as an improvement unless we can give something like a
formal demonstration that it is better than what went before.

These lofty conceptions of rationality and justification often go
hand in hand with the view that rationality is powerful enough, in
principle, to settle all difficult cases or to bring all rational
people into agreement. But this overlooks the possibility of
less-exalted conceptions of rationality which, although they cannot
guarantee convergence or agreement, can still lead to various sorts of
epistemic improvements in a person's or group's standards and beliefs.
What we need are not completely framework-independent epistemic
standards, but a diligent attempt to do the best with what we have; to
forthrightly acknowledge that we have preconceptions and biases of
various sorts, but to strive to pinpoint such limitations and to
discount for them when we can.

Various philosophers have suggested ways in which our beliefs and
standards could improve over time in spite of the fact that we are
historically and culturally situated creatures. For example, John Dewey
and others argue that our epistemic standards evolve in trial-and-error
process of inquiry itself. Others suggest that the criteria for
rational change, even in science, sometimes involve things like
problem-solving ability, rather than getting closer to the truth about
some reality that is independent of our language and thought. Again,
the method of
reflective equilibrium
may allow us to improve both
our general standards and our particular beliefs from the inside,
without having to employ some timeless and immutable standards.
Although this method cannot guarantee that groups that begin with
different standards and beliefs will converge, it may nevertheless lead
both groups to better-justified overall sets of standards and
beliefs.

Even if we scale back our demands of rationality and justification,
however, an uncomfortable sense of the contingency of our own modes of
thought and evaluation may remain. The increasing salience of
historical and cultural diversity highlights modes of thinking and
acting that differ in interesting, and sometimes disquieting, ways from
our own. Had we been raised in a very different time or place, we could
easily have wound up with very different styles of thought, standards
of evaluation, and intuitions about what is obvious. Moreover, some of
these alternatives do not involve any obvious failure of rationality or
any violation of epistemic norms.

All of this can be unsettling, because the recognition of such
differences, especially differences that seem difficult to settle in a
nonquestion-begging way, is in tension with the fact that in practice
it is virtually impossible to view our most central concepts and
beliefs and principles as just one set among many equally good ones. We
want to be able to say more than “Well, this is how we do things
where I come from,” or “You are wrong because you
aren't measuring up to my standards.” It would be
gratifying to find a way to avoid the tension this sense of contingency
can generate, but it is not altogether obvious there is one to be
found.

The literature on relativism is nearly endless, so the usual
disclaimers about incomplete coverage apply more than usual. The
following references will point the reader to important literature in
various areas, some of which includes detailed bibliographies.

Anderson, John R. (1990) The Adaptive Character of
Thought. London: Hove.

Attempt by a major cognitive psychologist to
explain various aspects of human cognition on the assumption that they
are well adapted to the environment.

Beattie, John (1964) Other Cultures: Aims, Methods, and
Achievements in Social Anthropology. London: Cohen &
West.

Benedict, Ruth (1934) Patterns of Culture. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.

Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas (1966) The Social
Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.
Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Collingwood's absolute presuppositions are
similar in many ways to conceptual frameworks; he discusses these and
the way they have differed through history.

D'Andrade, Roy G. (1995) The Development of Cognitive
Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A very readable account of the development of
the field by one who played an active role.

Davidson, Donald (1974) “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual
Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association, 5-20. Reprinted in his Inquiries
into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Davidson's classic attack on the relativism and
the attendant notion of a conceptual scheme; his volume contains
additional papers on the radical interpretation and the principle of
charity. References to reprinted version.

Donald, Merlin (1991) Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages
in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Attempts to synthesize work in psychology,
neurobiology and anthropology to provide a speculative, but informed
and interesting, account of how the human mind evolved in tandem with
the evolution of the brain and of culture.

Defends the view that worlds are
“made” through the construction and use of symbol
systems.

Gould, Jay Gould and Lewontin, Richard (1979) “The Spandrels
of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the
Adaptationist Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of
London B, 205; 581-598.

Kroeber, A. L., and Clyde. Kluckhohn (1952) “Culture: A
Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions,” Papers of the
Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University.

Classic treatment of the concept of culture by
two leading anthropologists of the day; still interesting, but bear its
date in mind.

James, William (1907) Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways
of Thinking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

An explicit, though often overlooked, defense of
the possibility of alternative conceptual frameworks.

Laudan, Larry (1977) Progress and its Problems. Towards a
Theory of Scientific Growth. Berkeley: University of California
Press.

Defends a “problem-solving model of
rationality” that aims to do justice to the fact that particular
standards of rationality have evolved over time while still enabling us
to make sensible judgments about the rationality of beliefs in other
periods.

A true classic; it revolutionized the philosophy
of science and placed the theory-ladenness of perception,
incommensurability, and the idea that there is no theory-independent
notion of truth on the agenda. The second edition contains an important
postscript.

––– (2000) The Road Since Structure. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.

A collection of Kuhn's writings from 1970 to
1993 along with an autobiographical interview

A collection of Whorf's papers, originally
published from the late twenties to early forties, in which he develops
a fairly extreme, but highly influential, version of the linguistic
relativity hypothesis. Close to a relativistic manifesto.

Contains a discussions by Winch, Gellner, Lukes,
MacIntyre and others of the possibility of alternative conceptions of
rationality; much of it inspired by claims of British social
anthropologists like Evans-Pritchard; little on American cultural
anthropologists like Boas and his students.

Wittgenstein's discussion of “hinge
propositions” and the nature of ultimate justification as resting
on contingent and unjustified beliefs and practices has relativistic
overtones. Based on work during the last eighteen months of his
life.